


and it always leads to you (and my hometown)

by jentheobscure



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst so mild it's not even really angst, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Friends to strangers to lovers?, Happy Ending, No Pregnancy, Safe to read if you are triggered by pregnancy, holiday fic, is that a thing?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 08:27:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28632507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jentheobscure/pseuds/jentheobscure
Summary: Rey Djarin is home for the holidays. But for the first time in five years, she's not the only one.Or, former best friends Rey and Ben are both visiting their parents for the holidays, which would be less of a problem if Ben hadn't basically disappeared from her life five years earlier with no explanation.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 14
Kudos: 98





	and it always leads to you (and my hometown)

**Author's Note:**

> Does it still count as a Christmas fic if you post it at the beginning of January? Oh well, I'm going to do it anyway. 
> 
> This fic was, naturally, meant to be up before the holidays, but writing it was honestly like pulling teeth a lot of the time. I'm still not entirely happy with it, but hopefully y'all will be. Please let me know if I'm missing any tags or anything.
> 
> Title from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuvhOD-mP8M). Also inspired by all of [Fran's](https://twitter.com/galacticidiots) amazing tweets which always make me laugh.

**December 19:**

She’s been home for all of eighteen hours before it comes up. Truthfully, Rey’s a little surprised it didn’t happen sooner, thinks it probably would have if she hadn’t schlepped into the house well after midnight the previous evening, trudging up to her room and collapsing immediately into bed without so much as saying hello to her dad.

“You know, I ran into Leia at the market the other day. She says Benjamin is home for Christmas this year.” Din’s voice is overly casual, affected even as he informs Rey about the return of someone she once would have been thrilled to see at any hour of any day.

Rey makes sure that her father is watching her before she rolls her eyes dramatically. “That’s nice for them, but I don’t care.”

She goes back to stirring, though the soup really doesn’t need her attention. She feels her father’s eyes still on her, clearly not done with the conversation he’s just tried to initiate, but Rey figures that if he wants to insist on talking about it, he can at least work for it.

“Don’t you think it’s time for the two of you to move past whatever happened between you? It’s been a long time, Punk.”

Rey huffs a heavy, disgruntled sigh. “I’ve told you before, _nothing_ _happened_. We just…grew apart, okay?”

The clatter of bowls and cutlery dampens his voice as he quips back, “I just have a hard time believing that the two of you were best friends since you punched that kid for him on the first day of kindergarten and then suddenly you’ve just ‘grown apart.’ That boy practically lived here when you two were teenagers, and then suddenly, you come home from college and fuss at me if I so much as mention his name.”

“I do not,” Rey whips around, spoon in hand, slinging droplets of broth over the linoleum.

Din levels her with a pointed look. “I said something about Ben Franklin one day and you sulked for hours. I may not know what happened with you two, but I know _you_.”

Maybe not her finest moment, Rey remembers. There’s really not much she can say to that, so she says nothing, stirring the soup a little more vigorously. She hears her dad chuckling behind her as he settles into a lazy lean against the countertop.

“You know I won’t make you tell me—hell, you and I _both_ know that I couldn’t make you tell me, even if I wanted to. I couldn’t even get you to eat vegetables when you were little,” he grumbles, still not over it. “But you and I don’t keep a lot of secrets from each other, Rey, and I just want to remind you that you don’t _have_ to keep this one. Not if you don’t want to.”

Rey turns to face her father, still leaning casually against the cabinets and counter. His face is relaxed, open, and so comforting that for a moment, Rey even sort of wants to tell him.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s not really anything to tell. Ben never said or did anything horrible to her. He didn’t betray her in any way. He didn’t do anything wrong, not really. He didn’t do anything _at all_ , she thinks bitterly.

“Thanks, dad,” Rey mutters after a long moment. They’re still watching each other carefully, and his face still looks a little expectant, but when she makes no move to elaborate, he sighs and rolls his eyes, fondly shaking his head, his shaggy hair that she’s always loved falling slightly further into his face.

“So, drinks?” he asks, and things are immediately back to normal as if the few stilted minutes they’d just spent in their weirdly silent standoff had never occurred at all.

 _White Christmas_ is white noise as they eat their soup and chase it down with scoops of the ice cream that Rey had loved as a little girl and her dad still buys every time he knows she’s coming home. It’s one of Rey’s favorite things about the holidays—these easy moments between them.

For all that she’s twenty-five years old and a fully functioning, gainfully employed, reasonably well-adjusted adult, there’s still no one in the world Rey feels more relaxed around. When he’d filled out the paperwork to adopt her at age four, Din hadn’t actually realized that he was adopting a little girl. Having been adopted himself, he was eager to offer someone else what was offered to him—a home, a family, a life in which they could grow into whomever they wanted. He claims that’s why he hadn’t paid closer attention to the forms he was signing or the people who were talking to him as he waited rather impatiently in the adoption office.

The first time he’d met her, a full six months before he was actually permitted to take her home full time, Rey had been a precocious three-year-old who had been hesitant and shy for a grand total of ten minutes before she was telling him all about herself and her toys, apparently as eager to be cared for as he was to care for her. He’d been very caught off guard at first, even asking the supervising adoption agent if there had been some mistake because wasn’t Rey a boy’s name?

Still, by the time she had livened up and started interacting with him rather than hiding behind the legs of the social worker she only sort of recognized, he was a goner. This kid—this wholly unexpected, impossibly sweet little girl—was the light of his life, and thus Din Djarin found himself in possession of a daughter.

While there had certainly been rocky moments, things he was ill prepared to navigate on his own (because no matter how good a father you are, there is just no way to prepare for the moment your little girl tells you she’s started her period and hands you a list of the things she needs from the grocery store), the pair of them were inseparable; two foundlings who found each other. Rey grew up with more love in her life than she ever imagined she would have when her parents abandoned her at just three years old. Thankfully, she was young enough when it happened that her memories of the event were vague, unformed things, though there were still occasional nightmares that haunted her.

Her dad had done everything he could to make up for the trauma of her being thrown away. He had put her in therapy as a kid because he knew firsthand that having someone who cared for you was not always enough to reverse the damage of what had come before. Moreover, he had been the most supportive parent that Rey knew, encouraging her to be honest with him no matter what, talking to her like a person rather than brushing her off as “just” a kid like so many parents. Because of him, Rey never did without the things she needed, never played a youth-league soccer game without a cheerleader on the sidelines; she never had a cold that went untended as a child, and later, as a teenager, never had a hangover that went unobserved (or unmocked, if she’s honest).

As an adult, things were no different. There was next to nothing that Rey felt she couldn’t talk to her father about, though there were definitely things she chose not to, for both of their sakes. Theirs had never been the kind of house where Rey needed to ask if she could have a snack or invite a friend over—it was her home, their home, and it was the most welcoming place in the world as far as she was concerned.

Six days before Christmas, they finish their movie, work together to load the dishwasher and tidy the kitchen, and turn in early with a kiss to her forehead and the promise of French toast—her favorite—the next morning.

Rey climbs the stairs and slips into the bedroom she’s had for most of her life. Her dad had never even considered repurposing her room after she’d moved out, despite the fact that many of her friends’ parents had jumped on the opportunity for more space, a home office, a craft room, a place to put the treadmill that never got used anyway.

In her ensuite, Rey goes through the motions of the nightly routine that she completes more like half the time than nightly. She’s distracted, her thoughts still fixed on the topic her dad had tried to raise with her earlier that evening.

 _Ben_.

It would be a lie to say that she never thought of him anymore, but over the years, he had ceased to be a constant presence in her mind. Still, it took little provocation for her memories of him to be fully resurrected, and little more for them to overtake her entirely.

They had grown up together, best friends from the first day they met. Rey had been four years old, Ben five, and like so many kids, it had taken next to nothing for them to latch onto each other. Another kid in their kindergarten class had dared to make fun of Ben for his slightly oversized ears (truly, they wouldn’t _really_ be a problem until middle school), and as soon as his wide brown eyes had begun to water, Rey was swinging a little fist at the other kid, landing a pint-sized punch just below his left eye, already yelling for him to leave her friend alone and stop being a meanie.

Much like she had with her father, Rey had become almost immediately inseparable from Ben. For the remainder of their childhoods, they had been practically attached at the hip. Every birthday was celebrated together. Every Halloween saw them trick-or-treating hand in hand. Every day was full of laughter and secret handshakes and made-up games. Ben’s parents were often busy, working away from home and leaving him in the care of a nanny, so it just made sense for him to start walking to Rey’s house after school instead of his own. He had practically lived at the Djarin residence during fourth grade.

As they’d grown older, they’d stayed close. Ben hit a series of growth spurts at age eleven that wouldn’t stop until he had turned eighteen which made them nearly unstoppable when they played chicken at pool parties but completely demolished their three-legged racing abilities at the yearly Harvest Festival. When she was twelve, Rey got braces and Ben learned to cut apples into bite-sized chunks instead of slices. Leia stopped letting them share a bed during sleepovers, but every afternoon and weekend continued to be spent at least partially in the company of the other.

Both of them had other friends, and their interests didn’t always align anymore, but it seemed as if nothing could ever come between them. Their freshman year of high school, Ben got tired of being the lanky kid, so he started playing baseball and Rey went to every game. The next year, Rey got asked on her first real date and Ben helped her pick an outfit. There had been occasional growing pains, but nothing that ever diminished their bond.

From the time they’d started getting crushes on classmates, people had teased them about being boyfriend and girlfriend—kids, parents, and teachers alike. That, too, never abated as the years passed, though they continually brushed people off, vehemently denying any implication that they were more than friends. As with most kids, there were “relationships” that lasted a few weeks before coming to quick and understated ends.

It wasn’t until Ben’s sixteenth birthday that it dawned on Rey that there might be something more between she and her best friend than she had ever considered. That night, there had been a party with their friends from school complete with cheap gifts (since they were all broke teenagers), Ben’s favorite cake, and a rousing game of spin the bottle. During the half-hour or so that the game was able to hold everyone’s attention, Ben only spun the bottle once, but watching him kiss Rose, however perfunctory a peck it was, had lit a fire in Rey’s stomach that nothing had managed to put out for the rest of the evening. When the party broke up and everyone headed home in time to make their curfews, Rey stayed, helping to clean up the mess their friends had made. It wasn’t until they were on the couch watching some raunchy comedy that had been gifted to him that evening, leaning into one another and sharing a blanket, that Rey felt the smoldering in her gut begin to extinguish. Waking up the following morning to the flash of Leia’s camera as she captured them—Ben sprawled over the couch he was now too tall to fully stretch out on, Rey collapsed half beside, half on top of him, drooling into the cotton of his t-shirt with smudged makeup and matching bedhead—Rey felt her heart beating in her throat; she couldn’t remember ever blushing before when she and Ben had woken up next to each other, which was not an especially rare occurrence.

From that day on, as much as she tried to fight it, there was an omnipresent tinge of _something_ around her relationship with Ben. She started taking notice of the way his features were shifting from something boyish and adorable into something sharper, handsome. His height stopped being a means to reach the high shelves in Target and started to be something oddly appealing, a reminder of how small she seemed standing next to him. Though she continued, just as he did, to deny that there was anything more than friendship between them, it felt more and more like she was lying to everyone—including herself.

By the time their junior prom rolled around—an event which Ben steadfastly refused to attend, no matter how much both Rey and Leia wheedled him about it—Rey was well and truly infatuated with her best friend. It was less a possibility and more a sometimes-painful reality, but one that she was gradually learning to live with.

The thing about Ben was that he had, since childhood, been a pretty forthright guy. Part of it stemmed from his general social discomfort, part from his intense desire not to be misunderstood. As such, Rey had always known Ben to be candid about his feelings, no matter what they were—at least with her. For the first time, it was something about him that frustrated her because it meant that she lived every day in full awareness of the fact that if Ben had any thoughts of her beyond those of friendship, he would almost certainly say something.

The only relief she had in those last two years of high school was that despite the numerous girls who would have gladly lined up for Ben Solo to look twice at them, much less anything more, he seemed in equal measure ignorant and disinterested. For the most part, nothing between them was different, especially if Rey didn’t let herself think about the flutter in her breathing when he smirked at her or the way her stomach flipped any time he touched her.

When they graduated, they would be apart for the longest stretch of time since they had known each other, and Rey couldn’t help feeling, as the day approached, that maybe she would be better off if she tried to put the whole thing behind her. College, she knew, would bring with it a host of new people and new opportunities, and it felt like her best hope of getting over her doomed-from-the-start feelings for Ben would be to let the newfound distance between them work in her favor.

She let herself have that one last summer with him—long days spent almost exclusively with one another—and on the day he left for college on the east coast, they stood in her driveway, his last stop before leaving town, and she sobbed into his shirt. He held her tightly as she cried for what she was about to lose, what she never got a chance to have, for everything that might have been. He wiped her tears with thick, clumsy fingers, and promised that they would see each other again soon—she didn’t bother disputing him. He kissed her forehead, promised to let her know he got there safely, and told her that he loved her. As she watched him climb into his car and send her one more fragile smile, she let her tears come for as long as they wanted without wiping them away and tried to pretend that he meant it the way she, by that point, so desperately wanted him to.

For the first few months, they had talked almost daily, writing emails when their schedules didn’t allow for them to Skype. He sent her a t-shirt from the campus bookstore, numerous playlists, and a list of books she had to read when she had the time. Rey mailed him his favorite cookies, an envelope full of photographs she had taken on campus, and links to a dozen Youtube videos she knew would make him laugh even though he’d deny it.

Still, it had been surprisingly easy, with Ben throwing himself into his schoolwork like a man possessed and Rey eager to experience everything she could of college life, for the physical distance between them to spill over into their emotional lives. The texts became briefer, the phone calls more rare. The fall and spring breaks of their two universities never quite matched up, so summer break and the Christmas holiday became the only times they really saw each other, and even then, the meetings were fewer and further between each year. They were always glad to see each other, relished in whatever time together they did get, but the perpetual ease of their past was just that—passed.

With each encounter, things between them were less familiar and more polite. Rey tried, desperately, to make herself believe that this is what she had wanted, that the plan she had made to let him go was working and their diminished comfort with one another was unequivocal proof. But time can only do so much, and while it shifted into something further off, even less possible than before, that flicker of desire never disappeared, reigniting itself in her chest with every interaction.

In her junior year, when Rey was twenty, her best friend’s parents were working abroad, so Rey brought Finn home with her for the Christmas holidays. Her dad had met him a couple of times, and he had joined Rey on their weekly Skype calls pretty regularly, so it seemed an obvious solution for him to tag along, and Din had been glad to extend the invitation. That Christmas, Rey had actually been looking forward to seeing Ben, eager to introduce her new friend to the boy who had shaped the first seventeen years of her life. Finn was scarcely more excited to be introduced, mostly because he wanted to meet the infamous Ben Solo against whom every guy who had taken an interest in Rey had been compared and found wanting in the three years he had known her.

They had been in her hometown for little more than a day when they crossed paths with Ben. Rey and Finn were spilling onto the sidewalk as they exited her favorite coffee shop in town when she spotted him on the sidewalk a few yards away. She had bounded toward him, tugging Finn by the hand along with her, until they had reached him. Never one to hold back her affection, Rey threw her arms around Ben’s middle, and he returned the hug albeit with much less enthusiasm.

“Who’s this?” he had asked, scrutinizing Finn even as he extended a hand to introduce himself.

It was the first time Ben had ever been genuinely dismissive of her, and she was certain he couldn’t have looked more eager to get away from her. They chatted for scant moments, and when she invited him to tag along as they went last-minute Christmas shopping, he had offered nothing more than a blunt, “No, thanks.”

Two full years of practice keeping Ben at arm’s length in an effort to keep her heart from getting broken proved pretty much useless that day. Ben extricated himself from the conversation as quickly as possible with gruff responses and curt goodbyes. Rey swallowed around the lump in her throat and tried to keep her voice from wavering as he all but sprinted away from her.

She hadn’t made it through the first store that afternoon before Finn found her crying in a fitting room and took her home. He spent the day trying to rationalize Ben’s behavior, but Rey had never needed help interpreting Ben Solo, and this was no exception. Once more, she cried over Ben until the tears gave way to dry, wretched sobs. _You wanted this, you did this, you did this to yourself_ , her brain repeated, and she grieved again for what might have been, if only he felt as much for her as she did him. Because try as she might, it would be a complete and utter lie to pretend that she wasn’t as much in love with him then as she had been when he’d held her in her driveway that last day or the hundreds of days before that.

Finn had stayed with her all afternoon, and when her dad came home to find her red-faced and feeble on the couch, he had asked no questions. She never knew if it was because he knew her well enough that he hadn’t needed to or that he trusted her enough to tell him if she wanted him to know. Instead, he’d joined them on the couch, letting Rey lean her whole body weight into his side as he wrapped an arm around her, kissed the top of her head, and turned on _Home Alone_ , one of her favorite Christmas movies since childhood. And when watching the film made her think of the hundreds of times she had done so with Ben, she silently let tears slip over the bridge of her nose and into the wool of her father’s sweater.

That was the last Christmas Ben had come home, as far as she knew. His family were as warm and welcoming to her as ever the next year, but the kind reception was tarnished significantly by the stab of guilt she felt—he would rather skip Christmas with his family than risk running into her.

From then on, Ben Solo had been practically taboo in her life.

And now, he had come home.

**December 20:**

After a fitful night’s sleep during which she had dreamed of sixteen year old Ben kissing her in the front seat of his secondhand car the way he never had, Rey wakes to the smell of cinnamon and bacon wafting up from the kitchen. She’s always been pretty food-motivated, and this morning is no exception, the growling of her stomach enough to drive her out of bed, to the bathroom, and then down the stairs still in her pjs.

“Morning, Punkinhead,” her dad greets her without looking away from the skillet he has on the stove. “Breakfast is almost ready. Will you get some plates?”

She shuffles toward the appropriate cabinet and begins collecting the appropriate dishes. Still bleary-eyed and yawning, she pours them cups of coffee, doctoring them both up just the way they each like.

As he dishes up their breakfast a few minutes later, Din says, “So, I was thinking we should go get the tree today. I have to go into the youth center for a while this morning to finish up some of the paperwork for the Toys for Tots collection, but I think we can get the ornaments and stuff out of storage before I go, and then you can test the lights and stuff while I’m gone so it’s ready for us to decorate tonight.”

Din never puts a tree up until Rey is there to help him decorate it, claiming it isn’t Christmas until she’s home anyway, so there’s no need for him to be in a hurry about it. She’s always loved the tradition, and this year is no exception. Though the funk from the previous evening’s reminiscences has not completely dissipated, the prospect of picking out a tree and decorating while her dad warbles along to Christmas music from their carefully curated Spotify playlist is enough to perk her up significantly.

They finish up their breakfast in short order, and Din deals with the dishes while Rey goes to get cleaned up for the day. She showers efficiently and outfits herself in fleece-lined leggings and one of her dad’s old sweaters that she had snatched several years before. She doesn’t bother styling her hair or putting on makeup of any kind, figuring that the only time she’ll be out today is when they go to the tree farm, and really, what good would it do her to get fixed up only to trek out into the thirty-degree weather?

When she’s done, she and her dad venture into the basement that’s suitable for nothing but storage. It only takes about an hour to unearth all of the right boxes of lights, ornaments, and various other décor they’ve accumulated over the years. Once the boxes are all upstairs, they start sorting through them, pulling out what remains of a set of Christmas dishes that had been a gift from an elderly neighbor who had lived next door and died when Rey was about nine. They find their stockings, the slightly crumpled wreath for the front door, and eventually, the lights for the front of the house and the tree.

Din leaves Rey to sort out the rest of it, promising he won’t be gone for more than a couple of hours. It’s a bit of a surprise to her how long the practical aspects of decorating for the holidays actually take, and she’s only just finished untangling and testing the strands of lights when he comes bustling back into the house, bringing with him a wave of icy air and the cacophony of his wordless singing.

“Ba-ba-ba-ba ba-da-da dum dum da dada dum dum,” he trills through the front hall and into the living room. Still carrying the tune of “Sleigh Ride,” he sings, “Hey, kiddo, are you ready to go pick out a Christmas tree?”

Rey laughs brightly, again reminded of just how good it is to be home. She stands from the floor and tells him she just needs to grab her boots and coat. Din has gone back to his tune as he catches her hand and twirls her a few times in the direction of the stairs. She giggles the whole way up to her room, his crooning following her ascent.

Rey digs out a warm pair of wool socks and quickly tugs them on. She briefly contemplates changing her clothes for something a little less…homely, but ultimately decides that her coat will cover the worst of it anyway. One nice thing about living in a small town for most of your life is that no matter what you look like when you go out, everyone there has probably seen you look worse at some point. She snatches a hat and some gloves from her suitcase that’s waiting for her to finish unpacking it and dashes back down the stairs.

Din has switched to “Jingle Bells” by the time she gets back down and finds her boots by the door. He doesn’t stop singing the whole time she’s lacing them up, nor when she pulls her coat on over her shoulders and tells him she’s ready to go. He sings all the way to the car, carrying on until the radio comes on and starts playing the middle of a different seasonal tune, at which point he happily switches to singing along with that.

“So how big are we thinking this year?” he finally asks as he navigates them toward the edge of town.

“Well, we have about six strands of tree lights that work, so not _too_ big, unless you want to go try to find some more. Pretty sure most places will be sold out by now, though.”

“Nahhh, I think that’s plenty. Maybe we can find one that’s about six foot? Might need to be kind of skinny though if we want lights on all of it.”

“Dad, of course we want lights on all of it! What kind of Christmas tree only has lights on _part_ of it?”

“Hey, I’m not here to judge anybody’s decorating preferences! I thought I taught you better than that, Punk. Maybe they can only reach the bottom half! Maybe they’re going for something more abstract! You never know, kid.”

Rey laughs and rolls her eyes, watching their small town roll by out the window. She waves at a couple of people she recognizes, but mostly, she just takes in the familiar sights as her dad keeps driving, thumbs keeping a beat on the steering wheel as he goes back to singing, this time with the accompaniment of the radio.

When they reach the lot, Din navigates the truck into an empty area of gravel since there aren’t really any defined parking spaces. Clambering out either side of the vehicle, they meet in the front and start weaving their way between the various sizes and varieties of evergreens.

“I’m going to look at the blue spruces. Pretty sure they’re supposed to be lighter.”

“Lighter?” Rey chuckles.

“Hey, I’m not getting any younger here, Punkin.”

As Rey continues browsing, she bumps into the proprietor of the tree farm, an exceptionally tall man in his early sixties who still looks fit enough to rip someone’s arms off if the need ever arose.

“Chewie!” she cries and is immediately wrapped in a bear hug that lifts her a few feet off the ground. “How have you been?”

“Welcome home, little girl! I can’t complain. Doesn’t always stop me, though. What about you? You just here for Christmas then?” She’s back on her feet by the time he finishes speaking, both of them grinning broadly at having crossed paths.

“I am! I only got here night before last, so we’re cutting it a little close getting our tree. Dad’s around here somewhere, too. He said something about blue spruces, I think. Is that even a real kind of tree?”

Chewie laughs boisterously, assuring her that it is. “I should go find him, see if he needs any help finding what he’s looking for. It’s good to see you, Rey. I want to see you again before you leave town, okay?” With her promise that she’ll get in touch, he wanders off leaving her alone once more as she goes about inspecting branches and estimating how many lights each tree might need.

When, a few minutes later, she has made her way deeper into the thicket of trees, Rey hears footsteps crunching over the frozen ground behind her come to an abrupt halt. Assuming that it’s her dad come to collect her or Chewie back to chat some more while she browses, Rey turns around, already smiling.

It must be comical, she thinks, the speed with which the corners of her mouth turn down into a much less pleasant expression when she realizes that it is neither of them.

Instead, Ben Solo stands not six feet away from her, looking nearly as shellshocked as she herself feels. They stand staring at one another wordlessly for long moments, neither of them knowing what to say, or if they should say anything at all.

Finally, Ben’s senses seem to resume function—which is more than Rey can say for herself—and he stammers out a slightly-too-loud-for-how-close-they-are, “Rey, hi.”

His voice is at once so familiar and so foreign that it startles Rey back to herself. “Hi, Ben.”

“I…didn’t expect to see you here.”

“It would be sort of strange if you had. Expected it, I mean. Your mom said you were coming home this year,” she informs him dumbly.

“You talked to my mom?” Ben’s voice contains a note of genuine interest now, but his face is still nearly inscrutable.

“No, my dad did. He told me that Leia mentioned you were coming home this year.”

“Oh. Yeah. How, uh, how is your dad?”

“Good, he’s good.”

“That’s…good.” Ben exhales heavily, his breath suddenly visible in the chilled air that seems to have grown even colder around them.

It is, to say the least, incredibly awkward, to be standing here in front of Ben, of all people. Suddenly, Rey is struck by the realization of what she’s wearing, what she must look like. And fuck, she absolutely would have taken the time to get dressed properly had she known she would find herself standing mere feet away from Benjamin fucking Solo.

Meanwhile, Ben himself looks like he’s just stepped out of the pages of a catalog. His black peacoat hangs unbuttoned over a black sweater patterned with gray and white. He’s sporting some rather fitted jeans that do unfairly tempting things to his already appealing figure. His hair is messy but still completely perfect. His large hands are encased in supple-looking black leather gloves, doubtlessly more expensive than any item of clothing she’s wearing. The look is capped off by the stylish-yet-practical boots he’s wearing. It is absolutely unfair, she thinks, that he just gets to casually walk around, looking like that. Especially while she’s standing there looking like she just rolled out of bed and into the first clothes she came across—which…okay, that’s not entirely dissimilar to what actually happened, but _still_ —so, so unfair.

Even worse is the way she finds herself suddenly blurting out, “You look really good.”

Instantly, her face is flushing, but she watches the corner of his mouth tick upward a fraction as he looks down at himself, presumably scanning his attire.

“Thank you. You look…just like I remember.”

So, _so_ unfair.

“Ummm, thanks? I guess?”

It really should not hurt as much as it does, but then, it’s been a long time since things with Ben went anything like she might hope for them to.

It’s possible that Ben’s face looks a touch more pink than it had a moment before, but Rey writes it off as the result of the cold wind that’s kicking up and rustling the branches of the trees around them. He stands there, mouth opening and closing like there’s something he wants to say, but when he fails to say anything at all, Rey takes the initiative to put them both out of their misery.

“So, I should go find my dad, but uh, it was…good to see you, Ben.”

“Yeah, um, you too.”

“Sooo, I’ll…see you around, maybe. Tell your parents I said hello.”

And without waiting for a reply, Rey retreats, bustling through the trees in the direction she vaguely thinks her father might be in. It takes another ten minutes of aimless wandering, during which time she worries Ben will wait around every corner she turns, but she does find him.

“Hey, Punkin, what do you think about this one?”

Rey hardly spares the tree a glance before replying. “It looks great! Perfect, even. We should get it and get out of here. Lots of decorating to do!”

Din shoots her an odd, concerned look, more than likely trying to riddle out what in the world is wrong with his daughter, but when she says nothing else, he concedes, pulling the tag off of the tree and heading over to the building where they’ll need to pay.

Twenty minutes later, the tree is loaded and tied down in the back of the truck, and Rey climbs back into the passenger seat. As Din backs the truck up and makes to exit the lot, looking in the sideview mirror, Rey thinks she catches sight of Ben once more, standing, watching, but when she turns her head to look, there’s no one there.

By the time they get home, she’s braced herself against her own emotions. She even manages not to think about him for the several hours she spends decorating the house with her dad. But that night, when she slips between her sheets and closes her eyes, her every thought turns to Ben.

**December 21:**

Rey wakes the next morning just in time for another quick breakfast with her father before he has to run off to the youth center for another full day of work.

“The food drive is tomorrow—I assume you’re willing to volunteer again this year?” When she nods in confirmation, he goes on. “Wonderful. I’ll be getting everything set up for that this morning, and then the kids come in for their last dress rehearsal this afternoon, which really means three hours of trying to get everyone into a costume and on and off the stage during the right scenes.”

“You love it, and you know it.” Rey sets about clearing the dishes from the table, stopping next to her dad to peck his cheek as she passes.

“What are you getting up to today?”

“Christmas shopping!”

“Rey, are you ever going to learn to start shopping early? Or better yet, just shop online like the rest of us.”

“Probably not,” Rey concedes. “I’ve already bought a few things; I just need to finish up. And shopping online takes almost all of the fun out of it.”

“Alright, you little weirdo. I hope you enjoy yourself.”

“Are you going to be home for dinner?”

“Lord, I hope so. Want me to pick something up as I come home, or should we cook?”

“Whatever you want. You know I’m not picky.”

“Seems like I remember something about that, yes,” Din laughs. “Alright, I’m out of here. See you later, kiddo.” He presses fleeting lips to her temple making Rey scrunch her face just to make him laugh. “Love you, Punkinhead.”

“Love you too, dad. Have a good day!”

And with that, Rey finds herself alone in the kitchen. Excited as she is to get busy with her shopping, she bustles through the necessary chores and rushes upstairs to shower and dress.

Knowing she’ll be out in town all day, and still fretting over what a mess she must have looked like during yesterday’s _encounter_ , she takes the time to piece together a better outfit, blow her hair dry, and her apply a basic layer of makeup.

Outfitted in a soft sweater and a pair of boyfriend jeans, Rey collects her boots, coat, and gloves, and heads for her car. As she drives to the town’s Main Street area, she sings along with every song that comes on the radio, which she would normally not even have on in her car. She parks in front of Amilyn Holdo’s coffee shop and waves to the proprietress through the front windows as she passes.

Though she had told her dad that her Christmas shopping was already well underway, truthfully, Rey has hardly even started. She has never had very many people to buy gifts for anyway, so last-minute shopping is sort of pattern for her by this point. Determined to find everything she needs in this one day, Rey ducks into the bookstore at the end of the row of shops to make her start.

For a while after that, everything is a blur. As quickly as she can, Rey makes her way up one side of the street and down the other, taking the blocks that housed nearly all of the local shops by storm. One by one, she crosses items off her list: a novel her dad had mentioned wanting to read, plus a new sweater, a weird digital clock with words instead of numbers that she’d seen in his Amazon wishlist a few weeks before, a single-cup espresso machine, and a surprisingly affordable set of wireless headphones; a new set of pastry utensils and an apron for Maz; a pair of gloves for Chewie to replace the slightly tattered ones she’d noticed him wearing the other day, as well as a hat to match. She picks up a dozen or so cards to leave for the neighbors she and her dad always bake gingerbread cookies for, as well as festive tins to store the cookies in. It is a hectic stretch of hours, but Rey is proud of how much she has accomplished—and a little relieved that she won’t have to drive to the next town over tomorrow to see if she might have better luck at the mall there.

As she is loading bags into her car for the second time that afternoon, she realizes she has yet to buy anything for Han and Leia. Because while she and Ben might not have been on the best of terms, she had stayed quite close with his parents. In years past, with Ben’s consistent absence hanging over the holidays with a big, festive pall, Rey had made it a point to catch up with them while she was back in town.

She could very well predict what she would receive from them—a lovely, thoughtful ornament that pertained to some aspect of her personality or an interest she had. Since Din had adopted her as a little girl, each year, Han and Leia (okay, mostly Leia—but Han always signed the card himself) gifted her an ornament, the idea being that by the time she was grown up and had a tree of her own to decorate, she would have a full set of ornaments to fill it with. It was a tradition that she sincerely loved, especially knowing that they had done the same thing for Ben. It made her feel like family, which was something Rey had always craved, even with the abundance of love and attention that her father doted on her with.

Ironically, it’s while she’s half spaced out thinking about what to buy for the Solos that she enters Amilyn’s coffeeshop for a well-deserved treat and immediately collides with none other than their offspring.

Because she doesn’t realize right away who or what she’s just run into, Rey begins stammering an apology, a fractured train of “shit, sorry, I should have been paying more attention, I’m so sorry.” She gets about three-quarters of the way through her apology before she looks up…and up, and up, and her words trail off without notice.

“It’s okay. I, uh, I wasn’t exactly paying a lot of attention to where I was going either. Sorry.”

“No, that’s—that’s okay. Did you, um—your coffee didn’t spill or anything, right?” Rey gestures unnecessarily at the paper cup currently being dwarfed by Ben’s overlarge left hand.

“No, no I’m okay. But uh, thanks for asking.” It’s less of a statement and more of a question with the way Ben’s voice ticks up at the end of his sentence.

“Sure,” Rey says, hardly audible. She clears her throat and drops her eyes from where they’ve been fixated on his _unfairly_ handsome face—because honestly, the years away look damn good on this fully-grown version of her former friend. In a stronger voice, she goes on, “Well, I was just going to—” and again gestures needlessly in the direction of the line waiting to approach the counter.

“Right. I was just leaving,” Ben says.

“I’ll, uh, I guess I’ll see you around then.”

There’s a subtle smirk tucked firmly in at the edge of his full lips, and Rey can’t look too long at it for fear of becoming visibly flustered. “It looks that way,” he quips, and Rey knows right away that she’ll spend far too many hours parsing those four words. “Bye, Rey.”

Her reply is little more than an exhale, and he’s already walking away from her. She tries not to let it feel like something significant and painfully familiar. It only sort of works.

After a few minutes in line thinking only about Ben and the good look at him she’d just had, as well as a few more minutes catching up with Amilyn, much to the chagrin of the few patrons in line behind her, Rey is armed with an oddly amazing white chocolate ginger toffee something or other latte that Amilyn had recommended, which is admittedly delicious, and a lot of thoughts. More than she would prefer.

She takes a seat and drinks her coffee, thankfully distracted by a few other familiar faces from the community who want to make small talk and wish her well. When she’s done, she tells Amilyn she’ll see her later, laughing that they both know she’ll be back in, probably multiple times, before the end of her stay.

Still determined to finish her shopping that day, she browses through a few more stores until she finds gifts for Han and Leia, adding them to her haul for the day. She’s finished just in time to head back to her house to have dinner with her dad, which she’s very much looking forward to, especially with the promise of takeout from one of her favorite local places. She asks him to pick up the food, mostly to buy herself time to carry in her shopping and stash the gifts she doesn’t want him to find, not that her dad is in the habit of snooping through her things, but still.

The rest of the evening is spent with each of them regaling the other with tales from their day over dinner and cheesy Christmas movies with dessert. It’s just the kind of evening she’s been looking forward to having once she got home. Rey just wishes she didn’t repeatedly find herself thinking of Ben throughout the rest of the night.

**December 22:**

Bright and early the next morning, Rey is awakened from a rather graphic dream about a certain persona non grata by her father knocking on her bedroom door.

“Wake up, Punk! We’ve got to be at the youth center in about an hour, and I’m making omelets!”

Groggy and hoarse from hours of sleep, Rey lets him know she’s awake. She makes no move to rush out of bed, despite the fact that she probably should if she only has an hour in which to dress, eat, and get to the youth center. When she hears her father’s footsteps on the stairs, she sits up in bed, rubs the sleep out of her eyes, cracks her back, and takes a deep breath. When she hears him opening the fridge to pull out ingredients and the subsequent clang and clatter that almost always accompanies Din Djarin cooking anything, she slips out from between her body-warmed sheets with as little movement as she can so as to not kick up a gust of cold air that will disturb the pleasant warmth of her bed, even as she leaves it.

Rey makes toward her bathroom, but she’s distracted by the view from the room’s only window. Between the gaps in the curtains which she hurriedly pulls back, Rey can see that it’s snowed sometime through the night. It doesn’t look like enough to do much with—certainly not enough for sledding or snowmen—but the roads are slushy and salted, the grass is blanketed in white, and the windows of every car she can see are frozen over. It’s charming, picturesque even, and Rey smiles to herself as she continues on her path to her shower.

She pees, turns the water on to let it warm up, strips quickly out of her clothes, and wets her toothbrush, coating it in toothpaste and taking it with her into the shower that’s starting to steam.

Fifteen minutes later, Rey emerges in a thick haze of humidity, wrapping a towel securely around herself and replacing her toothbrush in its place on her sink. She goes through her routine of applying moisturizer and drying her hair. With a rush of cool air, Rey steps out of the bathroom into her bedroom where she quickly pulls on jeans. She adds a plaid flannel button up and tugs a red sweater over her head on top of it. She fishes a pair of boots she hasn’t yet worn and later abandoned by the front door out of her closet floor and laces them up over a pair of patterned fuzzy socks. She ducks back into her bathroom to apply the lightest layer of makeup. As she examines her appearance, Rey tells herself there’s no need to worry about what she looks like—after all, she’s in for several long hours of lugging around cans and boxes of food and other household products.

It’s hardly the first time that Rey has been roped into helping her dad at the youth center’s annual holiday food drive. Since she was a kid herself, Din has gone out of his way to be candid with Rey about things like poverty and struggle, and it’s something that Rey knows only too well she could have had to deal with herself if her dad hadn’t adopted her when he did. More than once in her life, Rey has wondered if she might still have met her dad; if maybe she would have visited the youth center one afternoon and come across him. She wonders if she might still have wound up here, only a little later, but even that is a terrifying thought because it inevitably leads her to thinking about all the other things—and people—she might have missed out on if Din hadn’t come into her life exactly when he did.

“Rey, come eat! We gotta leave in twenty minutes!”

Rey shakes herself out of her melancholy thoughts and shuts off the lights in her bedroom and bathroom before descending the stairs in a canter.

Passing her a plate, Din gives his daughter an appraising look. “You look nice. Any particular reason you decided to get fixed up for the food drive?”

“I’m hardly ‘fixed up,’ Dad,” Rey snipes around her first mouthful. “I’m just wearing jeans and a sweater.”

“Yeah, but your hair’s down, and you’ve got the, uh, mascara or whatever going on there.”

Rey levels him with an unimpressed stare. “Listen, Queer Eye, putting on mascara does not constitute getting ‘fixed up.’ And my hair is down because I just washed it! Don’t worry—I’m sure it won’t last.”

Din holds his hands up, including the one still holding the spatula he’d been cooking with, in a gesture of submission. “My mistake! You don’t look nice! You look very average and normal and not at all nice or like you’ve put any thought at all into how many people you might see today.”

With her cheeks stuffed full of another overlarge bite, Rey rolls her eyes at him and grumbles a muffled, “Thank you.”

They finish their breakfast with very little chatter, but there’s no discomfort between them in the relative silence. When they’ve finished, they pile the dishes in the sink to be dealt with later, Din all but shooing Rey out the door, despite the fact that they still have plenty of time to get to the youth center which is only minutes from their house.

When they arrive, it’s to a flurry of activity. Several of the other employees and volunteers are already bustling about preparing different tables and areas of the large gymnasium space the youth center uses for nearly half of the activities and events they put on. There are even a few patrons already waiting for them to officially open the doors so they can make their donations and get on with the rest of their day. Additionally, there are a dozen or so kids frolicking around the room that is, frankly, too busy for them to be romping so carelessly. Some of them are helping to set up folding tables and chairs, others are dribbling basketballs or jumping rope, and there’s a group of what looks to be three or four trying to get up an ill-advised game of tag.

“Where should I—” Rey starts to ask her father, but he’s already pointing her in the direction of one of the numerous intake stations they have set up.

“We’ll start off over here, but as people bring stuff in, we might wind up moving and sorting things. There are only a handful of us who actually know where anything goes,” Din laughs.

Once they’ve claimed their spot and people who work at the center with her dad have started coming up to greet Rey—and to berate her gently for not coming around more often, or for moving away in the first place—Din collects their coats and Rey’s purse and goes to stow them out of the way in his office.

By the time he gets back, things are already in full swing. For the next couple of hours, there’s a steady stream of people bringing in all sorts of items. There are loads of canned goods and nonperishable foods, but also tons of household items, cleaning supplies, and hygiene products. Beyond the things they had more or less expected to receive, various people also attempt to donate some much-less-desirable items like coloring books in which nearly every page has already been used, a couple of old vacuums and mops, half-used beauty products, and in one bizarre instance, an actual horse’s saddle. After the first hour, they start up the annual contest to see who gets the weirdest donation, though when the saddle comes in just before noon, they’re almost afraid to see if anyone will beat it.

At 12:30, the local Girl Scout troop start bringing around snacks for the volunteers, many of whom are still too busy to take a break. The food drive is by far the biggest event of the year for donations to local food pantries and other charities, and this year is no exception. Between these two things, Rey isn’t really surprised that she doesn’t notice the man approaching her table, a single bag halfway full of cans clenched in his fist which he unceremoniously plonks down on the table in front of her.

“Hey there, gorgeous,” he drawls, and Rey flits her eyes away from the cookie she’s been munching on and toward him.

“Hi. Thanks for your donation, I’ll get these sorted.” She’s not explicitly dismissive, but she’s also not especially encouraging of his obvious attempt at flirting with her. When he lingers in front of her, heedless of the people behind him who keep having to move to some other table to drop off their donations, she asks him, “Is there something else I can help you with?”

“As a matter of fact,” he simpers, stepping forward and leaning into her space with his palms pressed flat to the thick plastic of the table, “I think you can.”

Rey glances behind her to see that her father has run off to some other task. She’ll have to manage this particular escape on her own, unfortunately.

“Oh?” she asks, “What’s that?”

“You can give me your number, angel.”

It hadn’t been unexpected, but it’s still disappointing to realize that this man is exactly as slimy as he seems.

“Oh, um. I’m not sure now is the best time for that,” she tries, hoping that he’s decent enough to realize that a charity event full of kids is maybe not the ideal moment to try to pick up a perfect stranger.

“Sure it is, cutie. But if you’d rather wait, you can give it to me tonight when you let me take you out.”

“Look, that’s…nice of you, but I don’t think that’s the best idea. I’m sorry.”

“Aw, come on. I’m a nice guy, babe. I promise I’ll show you a good time. And maybe you’ll show me a little something too, huh?”

Decidedly less friendly now, Rey glares up at him. “I’m trying to be nice here, but I’m really not interested. Now, I have a lot of work to do, so if there’s nothing else I can help you with, it’s probably best for you to go.”

It seems Rey is not the only one who is feeling less friendly at this turn of events. “I’m not the kind of guy who takes no for an answer, gorgeous. And can you really tell me you’re not interested in a date with a man like me? How long has it been since you had a real man, honey?”

Rey is just about to lose her cool and lay into the smarmy bastard when another voice intercedes.

“If you’re supposed to be this ‘real man,’ I can only imagine it hasn’t been long enough.”

Ben. _Fucking_. Solo. Of all people. Of course.

Rey can’t quite tear her eyes away now that she’s noticed him looming behind the man she’s still hoping to get rid of as quickly as possible.

“And just who the hell are you? Her bodyguard?”

“As far as you’re concerned, yes. Now, I think you’re done here.”

“I don’t think that’s for you to decide, douchebag.”

“Not that I’m not enjoying this little chat, but seriously, man, how many times does she have to tell you she’s not interested? Unless you think desperation is going to change her mind, you’re finished. Now walk away.”

“Fuck you, dude!” the man shouts at entirely too loud a volume, only slightly lost in the cacophony around them. “If she wants me to leave, she can tell me herself, so why don’t you just back the fuck off and stay out of other people’s business?”

“Actually,” Rey interjects before Ben can say anything else—a wise move if the grim expression he’s wearing is any indication. “I did ask you to leave. Maybe it’s just that I’m being polite that seems to have confused you, but I’m really not interested in going on a date with you, tonight or any other. So, thanks for your donation; you should go now.”

“Fuck that,” the guy snaps, snatching the one bag he’d carried in with him back off the table, turning half around before he looks between Ben and Rey once more, leaving them with a parting shot of, “and fuck you,” before he stomps toward the door.

Ben watches him all the way to the door, making sure he doesn’t divert his course to bother anyone else on his way out.

“Thank you for that,” Rey says quietly, tucking some hair behind her ear.

“Don’t thank me. I shouldn’t have had to say anything—he should have left when you told him to.”

“Yes, he should have. Something tells me it would have taken a lot longer for me to get rid of him on my own, though. I appreciate the help.”

Ben returns the grin Rey is now wearing. “You’re welcome,” he breathes. At the same time, he takes a couple of steps forward until he’s close enough to lift the bags of food and supplies he’s carried in onto the table.

As Rey pulls them over one bag at a time and peers inside at the variety of products. “Wow, Ben, this is…so generous of you.”

“I wish I could take all the credit. Mom and Dad are bringing in the rest; this is mostly her doing.” It’s preposterous, how endearing his embarrassment at his admission is.

“Still counts,” she shrugs, trying to tamp down the smile fighting its way onto her face.

Ben is clearly about to say something else, but Din chooses that moment to rematerialize at Rey’s elbow, approaching with a boisterous, “Hey, Punk, did you save me any of those cookies?” When he realizes that Rey is not alone, and moreover, that the figure on the other side of the table is a familiar one, his smile widens as he crows, “Ben Solo! Look at you, all grown up! Your mom told me you were coming back to town this Christmas. It’s nice to see you!”

“Nice to see you too, sir.” Ben’s tone is genuine, and it’s he who reaches a hand across the table to shake Din’s.

Din tosses his head in Rey’s direction, but his focus remains on Ben. “She giving you hard time?”

“No!” Rey protests at just the same time Ben laughs, “Not at all.”

Din winks at his daughter, bumping their hips together and reaching across her to snatch one of the—admittedly few—cookies left on her plate.

“Actually, Ben helped me get rid of someone who was giving _me_ a hard time.”

“Oh?” Din’s face takes a turn for the serious. He lets his gaze drift from Rey to Ben as he asks, “What happened?”

Ben shakes his head, brushing off the credit Rey is trying to give him. “Just some guy who didn’t want to take no for an answer. But really, I didn’t do anything. Rey’s always been able to fend for herself.”

“That she has.” Din’s laughter is loud, but it barely makes a dent in the noise of the room.

“I always liked that about her,” Ben mutters, looking to Rey.

She doesn’t get the chance to respond though before Han and Leia approach the table to join them.

“There you are, Ben!” Leia cries. “We lost you practically as soon as we stepped through the door.”

There’s heat in Ben’s cheeks now, but Rey doesn’t let herself attribute it to anything other than the shift in temperature coming in from outside, or maybe the crowded space of the gym.

“Han, Leia,” Din greets them. “Nice of you to bring stuff over!”

“Of course! I would have volunteered to help, but I’ve got plans to make Ben help me wrap the last of my gifts.”

“Hey, when he’s done with yours, send him to our house. I don’t think either of us has even started!”

Han sidesteps his wife and son, approaching the corner of the table where he can lean over and speak to Rey quietly. “How ya holding up, kid? Looked to me like Ben interrupted something.”

“I’m okay. Not lamenting the interruption, I promise.”

“I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear that,” he winks. Rolling his eyes toward where Ben is standing behind his right shoulder, Han asks her, “He listening?”

She glances at him and then back at Han just as quickly. “Probably. Though I did already thank him. I can’t imagine what else I could say to interest him.”

“Can’t you?” Han’s tone is loaded, his eyes squinted and sharp, his signature smirk—the one Ben inherited, much to the detriment of teenage Rey’s heart (and present Rey’s panties)—firmly in place.

When she looks back at him, Ben is being _too_ casual, obviously trying to cover up the fact that he had definitely been listening to them and doing a pretty pitiful job of it.

Rey tunes back in to her dad chatting with Leia just in time to hear her offer for he and Rey to join them for their Christmas dinner.

“We’ve got enough food for an army,” Leia assures him, “and we would love the extra company. I haven’t even had a chance to catch up with Rey yet!”

“We wouldn’t want to put you out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Din! It would be a pleasure to have you. Luke is coming down, and I think I’ve talked Maz into joining us this year. Amilyn and Chewie will be there, plus an old friend of Han’s are all coming as well. Honestly, we would love it if you came. Think about it, okay?”

Din’s eyes flicker between his daughter and Ben in a way that he probably thought was surreptitious but most definitely did not go unnoticed, not by Rey at least, and if she were guessing, not by anyone else either.

“I’m not sure if Rey made any other plans for us, but we’ll talk it over and let you know as soon as we can.”

“Perfect!” Leia declares. “Well, we should get out of your way and let you get back to work. It looks like you’ve still got a pretty steady crowd coming in.

“That we do, but it’s a good problem to have.” Din assures Leia once more that he’ll get back to her about dinner as quickly as possible, and there’s a general exchange of goodbyes between them all before the Solo family starts for the exit.

Before he’s more than a few feet away, Rey calls out, “Ben!” Instantly, he turns his whole body back around to face her, Han and Leia following suit and turning their heads as they stop walking. “Thank you,” she tells him, and she hopes he knows that whatever discomfort still lies between them—and the more she sees him, the more the discomfort builds in her chest—she’s sincere in this.

With his piercing eyes locked on her own, half-smiling, Ben enunciates both syllables of his reply: “Anytime.”

Once they’re far enough away to be out of earshot, Din stuffs another cookie in his mouth and asks, “What was that about?”

“Nothing. Like he said, some guy didn’t want to take no for an answer. He just wasn’t listening when I told him I wasn’t interested. Ben ran him off.”

Din chuckles, smiling smugly, “I always did like that boy.” At Rey’s mildly outraged scoff, he laughs again. “Alright, back to work.”

He turns as if to start sorting the numerous bags the Solos brought with them but leans back to tease her just a little bit more: “Remind me to send him a card, though.”

“Dad!”

**December 23:**

After another night of dreams about Ben Solo, Rey wakes on the morning of the day before Christmas Eve thinking about her interaction with Ben the day before. In fact, since she had watched he and his parents walk out of the gymnasium yesterday, Rey has thought quite a lot about Ben.

\--

It had been hard not to, after all. In addition to the fact that it was easily the nicest Ben had been to her pretty much since they started college, something about his actions had stood out to her enough to keep her occupied through the rest of the food drive. On the way home, her dad had asked her for the full story of what had happened with Ben and “the other guy.” Din had echoed his earlier sentiments of always having liked Ben, of what a good guy he had grown up to be (though he gave much of the credit for that to Han and Leia, despite the fact that Rey knew that Ben had always been exactly who he is, ever since they were children).

As they cooked dinner and ate it, they debated back and forth the merits of taking Leia up on her offer of spending Christmas with the Solos and company. For nearly an hour, there was a continuous volley between them— “It sounds like a lot of other people are going to be there too”; “They already have so many people coming”; “The food will definitely be good”; “It’s so last minute”; “Leia wants to catch up with you”; “I can have coffee with her before I leave.” On and on until they were settling down with another Christmas movie, they went in circles trying to talk each other in and out of attending Leia’s Christmas dinner.

“Is this about Ben?” her dad finally asks her, just as the opening credits of _It’s a Wonderful Life_ are starting to roll.

“What?” she snaps overly outraged by such a mild inquiry—which most definitely answers her father’s question in a way she had not been meaning to.

He gives her a smug, smiley look. “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’”

“It is not about Ben,” Rey huffs, crossing her arms over her chest so she looks as defensive as she feels. “It’s a nice offer and everything, and you know I love Han and Leia, but…isn’t it a little weird? I mean, with Ben home this year and everything, you would think they would want to have an actual family Christmas, you know?”

Din laughs, half scoffing. “Rey, they practically are family. Besides, they always have kind of a motley crew around for the holidays. Luke, Chewie and Maz, Lando, all of them. I don’t see why Ben finally coming home would change any of that.”

“Because he—”

“He’s their kid, kiddo. And sure, he has kind of a ‘prodigal son’ thing going on these last few years, but he’s still just Ben. She wouldn’t have invited us if she didn’t actually want us there.”

\--

And that had settled that debate.

The thought of spending the holidays with Ben—and his entire family—has been an intimidating one for the past twelve hours or so. Knowing that she’s likely to see him again tonight definitely does not help.

But there’s virtually no way that he’ll be able to talk his mother into letting him skip the youth center’s yearly Christmas program, especially not since she and Han have gotten heavily involved with the center’s board of directors in the last few years.

Rey spends the day with her dad, having breakfast, wrapping gifts, having lunch, wrapping gifts, having a snack, wrapping gifts—and then finally, it’s time for them to get dressed for the show that evening.

Given that it’s a Christmas play featuring a rag-tag group of kids from around town, it is by no means a dressy affair, but Din still polishes himself up in a jacket and tie—though the jeans do a lot to dress the whole look down. Rey opts for a sweater dress and leggings alongside her favorite boots. She curls her hair and puts on actual makeup for the second time since she’s been back in town.

As she’s straightening her dad’s tie, he asks her, “If I tell you look nice, are you gonna freak out again?”

Refusing to take the bait, Rey rolls her eyes and says evenly, “I did not freak out. And thank you.”

“Thanks for agreeing to come early. I can use all the help I can get making sure the kids all have their costumes and stuff. A few of our staff members and regular volunteers are visiting family and such, and not as many people seem to want to help out with the play _for some reason_ ,” he chuckles.

Thinking about the previous plays she’s seen at the center, Rey giggles too. “I can’t imagine why.”

Making their way to the youth center takes only a few minutes, and when they get there, they’re among the first people on site. It doesn’t take long for kids and their families to start making their way in though, and suddenly Rey finds herself swarmed by children with faces sticking out of holes cut in cardboard shaped and painted to look like Christmas bells.

“These costumes are, um, a little…avant garde,” she teases her dad.

“Oh, you have no idea. But I assure you, _The Little Bell That Could Not Ring_ is a can’t-miss production.”

“Well, sure.”

Just then, a tiny kid with oversized ears made more pronounced by his very own cardboard bell cutout that he’s got his face stuck though comes barreling in their direction. He does his best to wrap his little arms around Din’s legs, but with the bell in his way, he can’t quite manage it.

“Gregory!” Din shouts, “Hey, kid.”

Gregory is babbling a mile a minute about how excited he is to see Din (as if he doesn’t seem him several times a week, at least) and how he can’t wait for the show to start, and how a few minutes ago his nose had itched and he’d had to rub his nose against the wall to scratch it. Din takes it all in stride as Rey stands there just trying to keep up.

He’s a cute kid, she observes as he keeps right on talking. He’s very short, as are his little arms. All of his features are small, in fact, except for his eyes and his ears, which are both comically oversized for his tiny frame in a way that makes him look especially endearing.

She isn’t really paying attention until the kid stops chatting at her father and turns directly toward her. He grins up at her and says, unpretending in the way that only kids ever really are, “You’re pretty.”

“Oh,” Rey chirps, having not expected that to be their introduction. “Well, thank you. I like your costume very much.”

“Thank you! We got to help paint them ourselves!”

“That’s extra impressive then,” Rey assures him which makes Gregory beam up at her once more.

“Gregory, this is my daughter, Rey. You remember me talking about her?”

He turns his face up toward her father’s and says evenly, “You talk about her all the time.”

Din and Rey both laugh. “Yeah, I guess I do, kid.” He looks to his daughter and says, “Rey, this is Gregory. He’s one of our most involved kids around here.”

It’s her father’s way of saying that Gregory spends most of his time not spent in school here at the center because he has nowhere else to go. Rey sees the sadness in her father’s eyes, and something in his expression takes her straight back to her childhood, when they’d first met and he’d agreed to adopt her, despite the fact that she was not at all what he had been planning for.

“That’s great. Do you like it here, Gregory?”

“It’s my favorite!”

“Well, I can tell that my dad loves having you around.”

Gregory’s face turns a little pink with shyness, but he has no less enthusiasm when he tells her, “He’s my favorite too!”

Din smiles softly down at the kid, running his hand over the top of his head that’s hidden by the cardboard bell.

“You better go find all the other bells, okay, kid? I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Okay! See you later, Rey!”

“Bye, Gregory.”

When the child is safely out of earshot, Din confides in his daughter. “I found him out back one day a while ago. There was some kind of music playing and he was sitting there listening to it, chasing a frog around the alley. He didn’t know he was allowed to come inside. I still have no idea where he came from or who his parents are or anything. It took him quite a while to even trust me enough to tell me his actual name. I just kept calling him ‘kid.’ He’s living in a group home right now, but I keep hoping someone will take him in permanently. He’s a good kid.”

“He seems like it. And you never know. I didn’t get adopted until I was about his age.”

“I know, Punkinhead. I was there, remember?”

They laugh together for a moment before Rey speaks up, albeit hesitantly. “You know, you could adopt him. You did a pretty great job with me, after all.”

“I think I’m a little too old for that these days.”

“Dad, trust me, he wouldn’t mind. The kid clearly adores you.”

“It’s not that simple, Punk. But thank you, for saying that.”

“Just…think about it, okay?”

Din nods, tugging his daughter to him and wrapping her up in a bear hug which she readily returns. He presses his lips against her temple and exhales. “Love you.”

“I love you, too, Dad.”

When they break apart, Din chuckles at his own uncharacteristic emotional display. “Alright, get out of here. I gotta go find all the other kids and make sure they’ve all peed before we start lining them up to go on.”

“Glamorous.”

“Mmmm. You go find a seat; I’ll catch up with you after the play, okay?”

Rey nods and starts walking away from the backstage area. “Break a leg,” she crows, “Or, well, you know.”

“Thanks, kiddo; now beat it.”

Rey does as instructed, ducking out from the area that’s arbitrarily been deemed “backstage.” There are already several people milling around the space where chairs have been set up in front of the makeshift stage. She scans the room, looking for someone she knows well enough to sit with. It’s not that she can’t sit on her own or that she would feel uncomfortable doing so, but something about the idea makes her feel a little conspicuous.

There are a few familiar faces in the crowd, but no one she really knows all that well. Rey has just pulled out her phone to text Maz or Amilyn or someone when a familiar voice behind her starts calling her name.

She takes a deep breath in, lets it out slowly, all the while hoping the rise and fall of her shoulders is not so dramatic as to be noticeable. When she feels a little more braced for impact, she turns to find—just as she’d expected—a regal looking Leia trailed by Han in his standard leather jacket, and a few feet behind him, Ben, who looks obscenely appealing, like he’d put above average effort into his appearance despite the fact that he’s attending a children’s play in a room full of people who haven’t seen him since he was about twenty years old.

“Leia, hi,” Rey breathes when the woman and her two shadows are close enough to hear her.

“Is Din backstage?”

Not having expected that question—and thinking that Leia almost definitely knows the answer already—Rey replies, “Oh, um, yes, he is.”

“Good; then you can come sit with us.”

“Oh—well—”

Leia is pretty much ignoring her before she can even attempt to get out of this new plan, but Han shoots her a wink and grumbles, “Save your breath, kid. You know the princess doesn’t take no for an answer.”

Rey sighs and giggles, her only response, but when Han gestures for her to follow his wife, she obliges. There’s an odd kind of shuffle when they get to the row that Leia has decided on, and they wind up filing into their chairs Ben, Han, Leia, and Rey at the end of the row. There are still about fifteen minutes until the play is actually meant to start, and Leia uses that time to, more or less, ignore her husband and son in favor of getting caught up on Rey and what her life has been like recently.

It only takes a couple of minutes for Leia to bring the subject round to Christmas dinner, asking if Rey and Din have had a chance to talk it over.

“We have,” Rey nods. On Leia’s other side, Han and Ben—who have been chatting to themselves—are now clearly tuned in to her answer, as if they’re especially invested in what she’ll say. “And if you’re absolutely certain it wouldn’t be any kind of imposition—”

She doesn’t even get to finish the sentence before Leia is squealing, “That is fantastic news! I’m so glad you’re going to join us. And of course it won’t be an imposition—we are absolutely thrilled, aren’t we, Han?”

“Sure, princess,” Han responds in a bored tone, but over Leia’s head, he winks at Rey and smirks. It makes Rey grin a little wider and more sincerely than the mostly-polite one she’s been sporting.

Leia goes back to talking her ear off, and Rey tries to keep up with the conversation as best she can. Just a few minutes before the show is supposed to begin, Ben stands—impossibly tall over the rows and rows of folding chairs—and shimmies past all of them, excusing himself to the restroom. It briefly puts his ass directly in Rey’s face, and she can’t explain where the thought comes from when she thinks, “Better this than the other way around.” She tries to hide her reddened cheeks as he brushes past her. Han hollers for him to bring him back some M&Ms from the little concessions stand the center always sets up to rake in a few extra dollars during events like this. Leia requests a plain Hersey’s bar. Ben nods long-sufferingly, but he does stop beside the end of the row to ask Rey if she’d like anything.

“Me? Oh no, I’m fine,” she stammers. “Thank you though.”

As he nods and walks away, Rey lets herself be sucked back into the full force whirlwind of Leia’s conversation, which now that his companion has left, Han joins in on. It’s honestly nice, talking to them. Rey has always loved Han and Leia, ever since she was a little girl and Han would take her and Ben for rides in whatever muscle car he was tinkering with at the time. She and Ben had spent most of their childhoods side by side, so much so that Han and Leia were like a second set of parents to her growing up.

It doesn’t take long for Ben to return, but when he does, he stops at the end of the row and tells Han to scoot down a seat, that he doesn’t want to have to climb over all of them again. Rey and Leia both glance at Han, out of habit more than actual interest, and Rey can’t help noticing a twinkle of _something_ in his eye as he smirks across at his son and says, “Sure, kid.”

He moves down one seat, and Leia follows suit, and then Rey. It’s not until she’s lifting herself into the seat next to the one on the end that it really clicks that Ben intends to sit next to her for the duration of the play. It feels like a much bigger deal than it actually is, and that in and of itself is enough to frustrate Rey. She’s a grown woman, for god’s sake—it should not matter that her teenage crush is sitting next to her now.

Nor should it matter, she insists to herself, that as he passes down the requested candy to his parents—reaching right across Rey with his oversized palm containing both packages—that he also produces a king sized Reese’s. He tears the paper and immediately offers one to Rey. Politely, she refuses him, but she can’t help wondering if he’d bought this candy because he remembers that it’s her favorite.

“Rey, seriously, just take it. You love Reese’s cups.”

Rey lifts her eyes to his face, and he looks sincere, his expression more open than she’s seen it in a long time. He half-smiles down at her, reaching over to take her left hand in his right. He turns the palm of her hand up and uses his other to tip the candy bar package up just enough for a peanut butter cup to slide out into her palm.

Her eyes flicker back to his face as she thanks him, watching the gentle grin that stretches over his mouth when he says, “You’re welcome.”

Ben takes his own piece of candy, unwraps it, and stuff it into his mouth in one bite. Perhaps unaware that Rey has been watching him as she bites her own portion in half, Ben’s face flushes when he realizes.

“They keep making these things smaller,” he huffs.

Still grinning at his embarrassment, Rey mumbles around her mouthful, “They definitely do.”

Ben starts to take out another piece from the king sized package but looks at Rey out of the corner of his eye and seems to think better of it. He doesn’t reach for the candy again until the lights in the gym have dimmed and Din has come out on the stage to make the usual announcements about how hard the kids have worked and how fantastic the volunteers have been and how they are taking monetary donations at several spots around the large room. When he takes his own piece, Ben automatically offers the last one to Rey, and with his eyes wide and sincere in the dark, she finds she can’t refuse him. And how familiar a feeling that is.

\--

After the play is over, Din excuses himself as quickly as he can from parents and kids alike who all seem to want to talk to him. It takes more than a few minutes to find Rey in the crowd, but when he spots Ben and Han Solo, both looking down at whoever they’re talking to, he thinks he might be onto something.

They make easy conversation for a few minutes, and Din promises that they’ll see them for Christmas dinner.

“Should we bring anything?” Rey asks, and Ben smiles down at his shoes when she does, but Leia waves her off, assuring her that the food is more than taken care of.

Shortly thereafter, the two families part ways, and while his daughter seems oblivious, Din catches Ben looking over his shoulder at her as he follows his parents in the opposite direction. After saying a few more goodbyes and telling the staff and volunteers that they need not worry about cleaning up too much, that all of it will wait until the twenty-sixth, Din and Rey exit into the cold and bustle toward his truck.

“So, are you and young Solo back on speaking terms after yesterday then?”

“What?” Rey seems to recognize her own eagerness and her speech is more sedate when she continues. “Oh, no, not really. Leia just asked me to sit with them.”

“Ah. And Ben just happened to sit down next to you? Don’t think I didn’t notice that, by the way.”

“Yeah, sort of. He got up just before the show and didn’t want to climb over everyone to get back to where he was sitting before, so.” Rey shrugs, as if no more explanation is necessary.

“I see. Seems like you two have been crossing paths a lot this week.”

Another shrug. “I guess so.”

“Mmhmmmm,” Din drawls, trying to provoke more of a response than he’s getting so far.

When she realizes that he’s waiting for her to carry on, Rey sighs. “It’s not a _thing_ , dad. It’s just coincidence. It’s a small town, it’s right before Christmas, his parents are involved in basically everything. It makes sense that we would run into each other.”

“Sure it does. Of course it does.”

“Dad. It doesn’t mean anything, okay? Don’t make it more than it is, please.”

Din looks over at his daughter in the darkness, her silhouette illuminated only by the passing streetlights and the headlights of the other cars on the road. She looks unsettled, uncertain. She looks like she’s trying to talk herself into something, or out of it. Like she doesn’t quite believe what she’s saying, but instead believes that she _should_ believe it. It tells him everything he needs to know, at least for now.

“Okay, Punk. Okay.”

**December 24:**

It’s been a tradition for as long as Rey can remember. Every year on Christmas Eve, Maz’s nearest and dearest are invited to her closed café to bake and decorate and eat all the Christmas cookies they could ever want. Rey remembers her first Christmas Eve with her dad, when having a home still felt like it might not last. She couldn’t believe that she was allowed to have cookies, much less to have as many cookies as her little body could hold. Getting to help bake and decorate them was the most fun tiny Rey had ever had in her life to that point. It was one of her favorite parts of the holidays all throughout her childhood, one of her favorite days of the entire year, in fact.

As kids, she and Ben had basically had the run of the place, all of the adults eager to share in their enjoyment. There had sometimes been other kids around, but for the most part, it was just the two of them and the adults. Rey remembers vividly the year that Ben had accidentally spilled bright red icing down the front of Rey’s sweater and that _he_ had been the one to cry about it, not her. She remembers the year Maz taught her to make chocolate crinkle cookies, just because they were her dad’s favorite. There was the year when, as teenagers, Ben and Rey had insisted on baking all of the cookies for everyone to decorate and wound up burning more than half of them. The first year she was home from college, the year she brought Finn home with her, was the first year that Ben had ever missed baking cookies at Maz’s, and he’d been part of the tradition even longer than Rey herself had. He had claimed he was sick, that the thought of cookies made him nauseous, that he didn’t want to ruin everyone’s fun, but after their strange encounter on the sidewalk a couple of days before and given his radio silence since then despite her numerous attempts to get in touch, Rey had never quite believed him. Since none of them ever had any more kids, and especially after Ben stopped coming home for the holidays, there had been a point in time when Rey thought the tradition might come to an end, but every year, she showed up, and every year, Maz was already expecting her.

As she got dressed that afternoon in a festive sweater and a pair of jeans, Rey wondered what the tradition might look like this year. Han and Leia had kept turning up at Maz’s every year even after Ben had stopped coming. There was no reason to assume they would break pattern this year. But then there was Ben, and Rey doesn’t feel like she has any idea what he might or might not do these days.

Moreover, she’s not sure if she wants him to show up or not. A part of her selfishly wants him to feel like he might or might not be welcome anymore. After all, he had made them all wonder for years what they had done wrong (or maybe that was just her); a little insecurity on his part hardly seems as bad. The other part of her though, the part that stops to take people like Maz and Leia into consideration, wants him to tuck his tail between his legs and show up because he knows it will make them happy. And maybe she wonders if he’s at all concerned about what she will think about whether or not he makes an appearance. After the last few days, she thinks maybe he might be.

She heads downstairs to find her dad, discovering him sitting on the couch, scrolling through his phone while the TV plays absently in the background. After startling him out of his reverie by asking if he’s ready to go, the two of them pile into his truck once more and make their way to Maz’s.

They’re not the first ones there—they almost never are. In fact, it seems that everyone but Amilyn has beaten them there this year. Maz is dwarfed on either side by Chewie and Ben behind the counter while Leia and Han sit at a table sipping mugs of something or other.

“Finally!” Maz shouts, making no move to push past either of the men flanking her. “I would not let them start until you were here and Ben has been getting antsy.”

“I wasn’t getting ‘antsy,’ Maz, I just…want cookies.”

Maz rolls her eyes but doesn’t dignify his half-cocked-at-best excuse with an actual response. “Rey, you come help us get started. Din, get some coffee or something, I don’t know.”

Maz brushes past Chewie until she can wrap her tiny palm around Rey’s wrist, an action which she attempts to mirror with Ben on her other side, though with much less success given the giant discrepancy between her petite stature and his massive frame. Determined as she is though, and because neither of them would dare refuse her anything she asked of them, she drags them both into the kitchen and puts them straight to work mixing and measuring. As they work up the four or five different kinds of cookie dough—including a huge batch of plain sugar cookies which are the easiest to decorate, as well as being Han and Chewie’s favorites—the kitchen is a flurry of movement. Maz is generally present, though she does drift in and out, and there are usually at least a couple of others poking their heads in every few minutes. Ben and Rey, however, remain the only constants in the comings and goings of the room.

When the last batch of cookies is out, Maz, Amilyn, Leia, and Din carry the cooling racks out and place them on tables usually occupied by customers. Generally, they all kind of spread out, claiming the cookies they want to decorate and taking them to various tables since the kitchen of the small café really isn’t big enough for more than a few adults to work in at once.

As they go, Maz asks if Ben and Rey will start tidying things up, loading the dishwasher with a first load of mixing bowls and utensils, wiping down counters, stowing away excess ingredients and such.

In the several days that Ben and Rey have been running in the same circle once again, it’s the first time that they’ve actually been alone. Something in the knowing smiles that the four adults who had come to claim cookies were all wearing makes Rey feel like maybe that’s not entirely coincidental.

The first few minutes pass, marked by the clangor of kitchenware and studious silence from both Ben and Rey. The decided discomfort dissipates forcibly when Ben tries to step around way to put a dirty cookie sheet in the sink and Rey tries to step around Ben to store a bag of sugar in the café’s pantry. It’s the traditional bob and weave where they keep moving in the same direction, and if Rey weren’t still so uncertain about where she stands with him, she might ordinarily find it funny, maybe even a little charming.

Eventually, Ben chuckles, drops his grin toward his shoes and says, “I’m going to stand here. You go around.”

Another few moments of amicable and unfamiliar quiet pass between them, and Rey thinks that maybe this is what they’re doomed to, at least for the time being. She’s just beginning to wonder if maybe after a few more years of this they’ll have worked their way back up to small-talk—the kind you make with people you used to be friends with when you bump into each other in your shared hometown at the holidays. That is, assuming Ben bothers coming back for Christmas next year. She’s seconds away from a downward spiral of thoughts about what happens if Ben starts dating someone, brings someone home with him, or refuses to come home because he’s spending the holidays with their family, or has Han and Leia come to _them_ next year…

“This is a little uncomfortable, right?”

It’s pretty bold for him, and Rey hopes that he chalks those few seconds of hesitation up to surprise on her part, rather than a desperate grappling to bring herself back to reality.

“A little, yeah.” Rey pauses in her movements and looks at him, bent over a countertop with cleaning solution and a rag. She decides that maybe some candor on her part is called for as well. “I guess I just don’t know what to say to you anymore.”

Ben stops what he’s doing to make eye contact with her, mutters, “You can say anything you want to me, Rey,” in an overly sincere tone, and then goes right back to work.

She thinks it over for a minute, wondering if he’s at all considered what he might be letting himself in for, but when she tries to summon up her anger and hurt at his determined absence from her life—and everyone else’s—in the last several years, she catches sight of the loose tendrils of hair that always fall into his eyes, the way he still hunches his shoulders to make himself seem that fraction smaller just as he had started doing after his first major growth spurt. His thick eyelashes and familiar profile make it almost impossible for her to determine what she’s feeling, much less to voice it.

“I want to be mad at you, Ben. I _am_ mad at you. I figured that when we went off to college, we might grow apart a little, but I never expected you to just drop out of my life without any kind of explanation. Your parents were heartbroken every year when you didn’t show up, and you know, they never even tried to explain it to me, which I can only assume means you bailed on them exactly the same way you bailed on me. And then you show up here this year and you’re a grown man walking around, making me feel exactly like you did when we were sixteen, and I don’t know what to do with that. I mean, you were my best friend in the world, Ben, and then suddenly you just…weren’t.

“Suddenly, you weren’t there at all. And I want to know why, and I want to make you explain to me why you couldn’t even be bothered, after more than a decade of being friends, to even tell me what it was that I did wrong that made you want to stop speaking to me for so many years, and I want to know what the hell you were thinking, flaking out on your parents like that, and I want to hug you and punch you and probably yell at you some more, but god fucking damnit, Ben, I just have no idea what I could possibly say to even begin sorting any of that out.

“And that’s to say nothing of the fact that everywhere I have gone this week, there you are, and you just gape at me like a fish and then start, what, defending my honor or some shit, and now, once again, I’m standing three feet away from someone who used to mean everything to me, and I genuinely don’t have any idea what to do with that, you know?”

Maybe Rey feels a little winded in the wake of her tirade, but Ben is the one who looks it. He looks absolutely bowled over by the rapacious line of hard truths that have just been leveled at him.

It takes both of them several deep breaths to even be able to speak again.

“You’re right,” Ben finally grumbles, his voice hardly loud enough to be heard over the continued din of their family out in the restaurant. “I owe you some explanations, I know. And I can tell you right now that they won’t be nearly good enough to make up for—all of that. I don’t even know if you want to hear them, or if it will make any difference when you do, but…maybe we could talk? Tomorrow, after dinner, maybe? I think we have a lot we need to…sort out.”

Still reeling from the impact her own feelings had made around them, the massive emotional crater that she carved out and left them both standing mired in, Rey merely nods her head. “Sure, we can talk.”

They go back to quietly working around one another, and there’s something a little smoother about their motions, their shared maneuvering of the space and the process.

She’s just about to head for the door that joins the kitchen to the restaurant, more than a little eager to put some distance between herself and the man who makes her feel like a fraying exposed nerve and fully prepared to spend the evening carefully keeping the rest of the group between them.

The things is, however, that when you put two people on opposite ends of a line, forming the full circle invariably puts them right next to one another, almost as if they were intended to connect the whole time.

“Rey,” Ben starts, dipping his head back to the counter as she turns to face him again, keeping one hand on the door, poised to push and offer her an escape. “I’ve missed this. I have missed _you_.”

She doesn’t move, other than the lift of her shoulders involuntarily accompanying her deep inhale. She watches him, gaze steady and unrelenting. She pushes on the door with the slightest pressure, just enough to let a crack of darkness from the much dimmer Christmas lights decking the restaurant in to mingle with the fluorescence of the kitchen. Before she takes her first step out, however, she catches his eyes and holds him, rapt, under the anticipation of her evidently impending reply.

“You didn’t have to.”

**December 25:**

After a relatively tense Christmas Eve, Rey and Din had trekked home with their bellies and to-go containers full of cookies, and Rey had excused herself almost immediately to bed. Grateful that her father was the sort who only asked questions when he was pretty sure she was in the mood to answer them, she closed her bedroom door behind herself, got into her coziest pajamas, and laid awake for hours thinking about all of the things she should have said to Ben. Every start down that particular line of thought quickly devolved into terrified preoccupation with what in the world she might say to him during the talk that he had asked if they could have.

Already a looming specter of the ghosts of Christmases past, the dinner that Leia had insistently invited Rey and her dad to was swiftly becoming something that filled Rey with more dread than anything else. It was likely to be uncomfortable anyway, but Rey had no doubt that she would be able to focus on nothing else until she and Ben had had the promised discussion, and she had a hard time imagining any good would come from that.

For hours at a stretch, Rey laid there trying to remind herself that all those years ago, she had been the one to want distance between them, but she knew just as well that, even at the point when she was most utterly in love with him, her desire had never been for him to disappear as he had. Had her heart not been so tied up in Ben Solo, and had she not been so determined to protect herself from the inevitable fallout of finding out he did not and could never want her the way she wanted him, she would have never wanted him to be anywhere but with her. But, she reminded herself, it wasn’t as if she had ever told Ben about her plan to guard her heart by keeping him at arm’s length; he had vanished all on his own, and for all his own reasons.

\--

Christmas morning, Rey manages to vanquish all thoughts from her head besides those involved in sharing breakfast with her dad and exchanging gifts with him. It’s too bright in the house for the lights to have any real impact, but they still turn on every one of the strands they had used to decorate. They turn on one of the channels that’s playing nothing but Christmas movies all day and they veg and open presents and just enjoy being together as _Die Hard_ , _Holiday Inn_ , _While You Were Sleeping_ , and _A Christmas Story_ play through in the background. Much like every other Christmas she has spent with her father, it’s exactly what Rey needs—his knack for knowing her so well is the best present he gives her, every single year.

When it is, at last, time for them to dress for Christmas dinner with the Solos and friends, Rey dons a simple black sweater dress over sheer black tights. She adds the boots she usually only wears to her office, as well as a pair of sparkly stud earrings from the limited array of jewelry she owns. Her hair is curled once more, the sides pulled back from her face which is highlighted by glittery eye shadow and a dusty rose lipstick. It’s the most effort Rey has put into her appearance in a while, and she tries to convince herself it will be enough to give her the confidence to have the conversation with Ben that lingers constantly in her mind, only growing to demand more of her focus as the time approaches.

She tells herself it will only be a few more hours. A few more hours until they will go their separate ways once more, back to the lives they no longer share. And maybe next Christmas, their paths will cross again in polite exchanges at the grocery store, or maybe baking cookies at Maz’s on Christmas Eve will be the only time their lives intersect from here on out. Whatever happens, Rey will learn to live with it—just like she had learned to live with the knowledge that Ben would never look at her as someone he would like to wake up next to or even fall into bed with—and at least she will know where she stands.

Descending the stairs, Rey wordlessly heads for the foyer where she slips on her coat and scarf, tucking her gloves into the pockets on either side of her coat. She ducks into the living room to sort out the right presents from underneath the tree for everyone she knows will be there tonight and collect them all in a large paper bag. Next, Rey walks to the kitchen, trying her hardest to focus on this one thing that she must do next rather than everything she knows will come over the course of the evening. Walk to the kitchen. Take the dish of rice out of the warmer. Put it in the casserole-carrier bag that had been given to her when she got her first apartment and which only gets used on occasions like this. Take the dessert out of the fridge. Put it in the keep-cold bag. Put that bag in the carrier bag. Locate father.

It’s procedural and mindless, but mostly, it’s manageable—and something that feels like it’s firmly in her control is exactly what Rey needs right now.

“You look beautiful, Rey.”

“Thanks, dad.”

It begins to feel like “grateful” might not quite cover it when Din stops her from leaving the kitchen with her offerings in tow with a gentle touch of his hand on her forearm.

“Rey, you know we don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

Rey scoffs. “Of course we do. Leia would be so disappointed if we didn’t show up, and it’s not like any excuse we could give her this close to time would ever sound sincere. We absolutely have to go.”

“Not if you don’t want to, kid. Really. I know you don’t want to disappoint any of them, but Rey, honey, you look pretty miserable. Now, I don’t know exactly what it is that’s making you so upset, but I do know that if there’s something I can do that will help fix it, I am willing to do it, no questions asked.”

Rey can’t help but smile frailly at her father. “Thanks, Dad, but really, I’m okay.” She steps closer so she can peck his cheek. “I love you for offering, though.”

“I just want you to be happy, Punk. I don’t get to have you here as much as I’d like to these days, and this is _our_ holiday, too, you know? If you don’t feel like doing this, we won’t do it. I just—you deserve a merry Christmas, Rey, and whatever that looks like—if it’s right for you, it’s right for me.”

“I love you,” Rey says, fending off tears that are already clouding her vision. She sits down everything she’s holding and steps forward again so she can sink into her father’s embrace. She’s beyond appreciative of his determination not to push or pry, that he is willing to scrap their entire plan if it might make her happier to do something else, that he is her dad and that she’s spent most of her years living in full knowledge of the comfort that their life has offered her.

Before she makes to release him from her arms twined around his neck, Rey speaks again. “We _should_ go though. Leia’s expecting us any minute, and we’re already dressed, and we made food and stuff. Besides, what would we do if we stayed here anyway?”

“Okay,” Din draws back smiling at her familiar determination, “but if we need to leave at any point in time, you just say the word and we’re out, okay? Remember, no questions asked.”

Just to tease him—and perhaps to lighten the mood a little—Rey finds herself asking, “Do you not ask because you don’t want to know, or is it just that you really don’t have questions?”

Din follows her lead, taking the carrier bag from her and letting himself be steered to the front door where Rey pauses to snatch the bag of presents and out into the slow-falling dusting of snow. “Some of both, I guess? It really just depends on the situation.”

\--

When they arrive at the Solo house, Din makes one more offer to make a break for it. When Rey refuses, he dutifully helps her drag the bag out of the car and up to the front porch. They ring the bell and wait only a moment before the door swings open and the overwhelming—in every sense of the word—figure of Ben Solo stands before them.

He smiles politely, though it looks a little nervous around the edges—which, oddly, makes Rey feel a bit better—and ushers them in, taking the bag of food they’ve brought with them and passing it off to someone at the corner of the kitchen. He comes back toward them to help them hang their coats and shed off some of the many requisite layers, but before he can offer any help, Din is already helping Rey out of hers and Ben stands gaping.

It takes a moment for the weight of his gaze to register on Rey, for the feeling of being watched to prickle at the back of her awareness. When it does, she risks a glance at Ben to find him, indeed, affixed with his eyes never faltering from her.

“You look—” he trails off blankly, like he can’t quite manage a full sentence. “You’re stunning.”

Rey inhales sharply, because while anyone else commenting on her appearance would merely merit a ‘thank you,’ it doesn’t feel sufficient for this exchange.

She’s momentarily saved from saying anything when her father cuts in, “Thanks, kid. You clean up pretty good too.” And then, as if only just realizing, “Oh, you meant her? Yeah, yeah, she’s beautiful. Nothing new there.”

Rey wants desperately to jump on the out her dad has offered them both, but once again, she’s beaten to the punch.

“No, nothing new there,” Ben replies, hardly above a whisper, his eyes still pinned on Rey.

Just then, Han appears in the doorway of the kitchen and asks, “You gonna bring them in, kid?” He doesn’t bother waiting for Ben to answer him. “Rey, Leia has a question about your dessert thing. You mind coming in here for a minute?”

“Of course!” she cries, and practically bolts for the other room, leaving her father to deal with the gifts they had brought along.

Meanwhile, Ben and Din still linger in the entryway. Ben is halfway through offering the older man a drink and a seat in the living room when Din jumps in.

“Look, Ben, I want to say this while I can, because if my daughter knew I was saying it at all, she’d be pretty pissed at me.” Ben nods, and Din goes on. “I don’t know what’s going on with you two, and frankly, it’s none of my business. But I know _something_ is going on. And I know that I don’t want you breaking my daughter’s heart again, however unintentional it may be. So, whatever is happening with the two of you, just—tread carefully, okay?”

Ben takes a moment to get his words together, and infinitely patient, Din simply waits. “I...didn’t know that Rey felt like I’d ever broken her heart, but then, I think there have been more than a couple things I might have been wrong about where she’s concerned. Now, though, I just want to make things better between us, if I can. If she’ll let me.”

“Okay. Good. You know I’ve always liked you, kid. And we’re all really happy to have you home this year.” He pats Ben on the shoulder as the taller man bobs his head without meeting his eyes. “Now I can see that you’re uncomfortable, so why don’t we get a couple of those drinks you were mentioning?”

Ben chuckles, “That sounds good. And Mr. Djarin?”

“Oh, god, kid, you’ve known me your whole life—being gone for a few years doesn’t mean you can’t call me Din.”

Another chuckle, “Right. Din. I just—thank you.” It’s obvious that there’s more Ben wants to say, but equally as apparent that he doesn’t know how to say it, or maybe that he doesn’t feel like now is the time to say it. Instead, Din bumps his shoulder in Ben’s bicep—those few inches the kid has on him never quite going unnoticed—and they make their way to the living room to join some of the other guests.

\--

Less than an hour later, almost all of which Rey spent in the kitchen trying to be of help—and most definitely not avoiding Ben, or her father—the entire group is gathered around the table passing dishes and loading plates with as much food as they can contain. As the last of the dishes reaches Luke at the far end of the table, Leia stands and clinks her knife against the rim of her wine glass.

“I know most of us aren’t really religious per se, but I just want to say that Han and I are so glad to have each of you here with us to celebrate the holiday with good food and good company. You are all so special to us, and it is absolutely wonderful to have the whole family here this year.” She turns her attention to her son who is already blushing before she even says anything. “Ben, I know how much you’ll hate this, and you can fuss at me about it later, but right now, I just want to say that I am especially thrilled to have you home with us this year—I think this is the merriest Christmas we’ve had in…well, a really long time. Now,” Leia goes back to addressing the group at large, “without further ado, let’s eat!”

And eat they do. It’s a wonderful meal filled with overflowing wine glasses, delicious food, and cacophonous conversation all around. When each of them has cleared their plates and had their fill, the group disperses to give themselves a little reprieve before dessert. Most of the group scatter in the direction of the living room where there will be more drinks, certainly, and much more chatter. Rey lingers in the dining room to help Leia clear the dishes from the table and get everything set up so they can have dessert after they’ve exchanged their gifts.

She’s got a stack of plates accumulated and is just about to tote them to the kitchen where she can hear Leia already loading the dishwasher when a set of much larger hands closes over her own. She thinks for a fleeting moment that maybe it’s her dad, maybe Han or Chewie even, but really, Rey knows exactly whose hands those are, despite not having seen them so closely for many years.

“Here, let me,” he says, and there’s something about Ben’s quiet tone that will never not affect her.

Rey’s hands fall away from the sides of the stack of plates, relinquishing them to Ben who offers her the softest smile in exchange.

Determined to keep herself occupied, Rey collects the glasses and cutlery from the table. When she brings them into the adjoined kitchen, she finds Ben and Leia working together in comfortable silence. Someone has turned on some mellow Christmas music in the other room, and Leia hums along. She knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that he would deny it if she ever called him out on it, but Ben observes his mother with a fond smile. It makes Rey wonder if maybe he’s as glad to be home as Leia is to have him there.

As quietly as she can, Rey stacks the dishes on the counter and goes back to the dining room to collect the cloth napkins they had used with dinner. In the part of the living room that is visible to her as she stands next to the grand dining table, Rey can see her dad laughing with Han’s oldest friend, Lando Calrissian, as Maz perches in Chewie’s lap talking with someone just out of view, though she can safely assume it’s either Luke or Amilyn.

It really is nice, all of them being together like this. And dangerous as she knows it is, Rey allows herself a moment of indulgence to wonder what might have been. If she had told Ben how she felt about him when they were teenagers, or even if she’d pushed him on why he suddenly bailed on her after that third Christmas home from college, would they still be here now? It’s easy to imagine that they would have come home for the holidays together, taking turns staying with their alternate parents each year. Maybe they would be married, or they’d have had a baby by now and they’d be celebrating Christmas with Din and Han assembling toys while the two of them cuddled up together as they watched Leia and Maz and Amilyn fuss and coo over their child.

It is, in equal measure, a beautiful and torturous idea. Rey feels genuine relief when Leia nudges her elbow and asks if she’s coming, clearly not for the first time. Rey nods and they make their way into the living room with the others. They all spread out around the room, taking seats wherever they can find them as Leia enlists her husband to pass out the presents everyone had brought for one another.

Since not everyone who has gathered at the Solo house this year knows each other well enough to feel obligated to buy gifts for one another, it doesn’t take too awfully long for the presents to be distributed and unwrapped; soon enough, shreds of tattered paper in an array of colors and patterns litter the otherwise pristine hardwood floors and rugs in the living room. Rey ends up with the traditional ornament from Leia and Han, a personalized wine glass from Amilyn, a sweater from Maz, and a gift card from Chewie.

As Han and Ben set about collecting all of the paper and packaging, Rey moves into the kitchen with Amilyn and Leia to help bring out the array of desserts which everyone descends upon with fervor unbefitting people who had just eaten the feast they had all shared only an hour before. Once more, they all eat their fill and talk boisterously around the table where several conversations overlap each other at once.

Though she’s been avoiding looking his way for more than a couple of seconds at a time, Ben manages to catch Rey’s eye almost as soon as she’s taken the last bite of pie from her plate. He raises his eyebrows in question and nods as subtly as possible in the direction of the staircase that will lead to the second floor where Rey knows most of the bedrooms are, including the one that used to be Ben’s.

It’s not exactly as under the radar as she would like to be, but she excuses herself and ducks into the restroom to give herself a moment’s reprieve before she goes upstairs to where she can only assume Ben will already be waiting for her.

The path to Ben’s bedroom is both exceedingly familiar and entirely foreign to her at this point. It’s been years since she’s even set foot in this part of the house, but there’s no denying that she knows exactly where she’s headed as she moves down the hallway and knocks on the door she’s sure Ben is already waiting behind. Sure enough, he swings it open to reveal himself, a man who now looks out of place in his teenage bedroom.

“Hi.”

His word is an exhale that Rey can almost picture drawing directly into her lungs with the deep breath she draws to steady herself, like with that one word he’s managed to fill her chest, expand her lungs, make room for himself inside her, as if she hadn’t felt the yawning void of him all along.

“Hi,” Rey replies in a voice steady enough to make her proud of herself. They can have this talk that he had asked her for, but she isn’t ready to just bend to the power he still unknowingly has over her. Not yet.

She quirks her eyebrows at him so that he’s reminded they still haven’t made it further than the doorway, and if they’re going to have this conversation, it’s probably better done behind at least one closed door, which it seems is all they can manage at the moment.

“Oh, sorry. Um, I’ll just—” Eager for the little privacy they’ve got, Ben moves to close the door behind Rey as soon as she’s cleared the doorframe.

Where she once would have thought nothing of letting herself into this room, throwing herself down on this bed, making herself at home in this space that so decidedly belongs to the Ben she used to know, Rey doesn’t feel like she’s on sure footing here anymore, so she stays standing, folding her arms over her chest.

Ben, on the other hand, goes straight for the bed, sitting on the edge with his right knee bent up to lay on the duvet while his left foot stays flat on the floor.

Though it’s probably little more than a minute of silence that mounts between them, it feels interminable, and it’s enough to prompt Rey to speak.

“So, you wanted to talk to me.”

“Yeah, I uh, I do. I just—I’m sorry, but can you sit down? This is uncomfortable enough, I know, and you look like you’re about thirty seconds from bolting, so could you just—”

Rey concedes, taking a couple of steps closer to the bed where he sits. She could—probably should, in fact—cross the room and sit in the rolling desk chair that she remembers being acutely uncomfortable since it was adjusted to suit Ben’s height, but which is also a safe distance away—but instead, she drops daintily onto the very corner of the bed, still a few feet away from Ben, but not far enough to prevent her heartrate ticking slightly upward.

“Thank you,” Ben says when she’s settled, and it’s so earnest that Rey has no choice but to look at him rather than the bedspread that is one of the few things in the room that looks like it’s been changed since the last time she was here.

“Look, Rey, I just…” She waits, carefully not to indicate that she’s about to interrupt. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry, for just showing up this year and everything. I know it’s been a really long time since I’ve been home—god knows my mother won’t stop reminding me,” he chuckles, eyes on his knee propped up on the bed. “I know that you all have formed new traditions and stuff since then, and I just wanted to say that I’m sorry if me being here has made any of that difficult or uncomfortable for you.”

Reflexive and disbelieving, Rey asks, “Are you serious?” Judging by his blank look, she assumes he is. “Ben, you do not need to apologize to me for coming home for Christmas. If anything, you should apologize for _not_ coming home for the last, what, five years?”

“I’m sorry for that, too. I’m sorry for a lot of things, Rey.”

Once more, his sincerity surprises her, though she can’t quite figure why.

“Are you?” she asks, neither expecting an answer nor leaving him space to supply one. “Because you just took off, Ben. I came home that year after months of hardly ever hearing from you, and you basically just dropped off the face of the earth.”

“I know, and I know it’s stupid, but I just—” Ben huffs. “I didn’t think it would make any difference, I guess. I mean, we had been talking less and less, and I was really excited to see you when we both came home over break, but then I saw you that day with—” he swallows fitfully, exhaling another sigh. “And I guess I just realized how different everything was, how different things were with us. It wasn’t like we could just go on like nothing was different, you know?”

The conversation that was supposed to yield some sort of resolution is only serving to confuse her further. “Of course things were different, Ben; we had been away for the better part of three years by then! But there’s a big difference in us growing apart and you vanishing into thin air.”

“I know, I know that now,” Ben struggles to interject as Rey rails on.

“I mean, it was like you couldn’t get away from me fast enough that day on the sidewalk. Do you know how badly that hurt, Ben? For you to be standing right there in front of me, and to watch you decide right then and there that you just suddenly wanted nothing to do with me.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Rey. I just didn’t want to get hurt either.”

“And like it wasn’t bad enough already, I had to spend basically the rest of the break trying to convince Finn that the best friend I had talked about for months on end wasn’t actually an asshole, despite all appearances to the contrary!”

“I know, Rey. You’re right, I know. I was an asshole. I don’t have a good explanation or even a good excuse; I just—I was stupid and selfish, and I didn’t understand that by trying to keep myself from getting hurt I was creating a lot of collateral damage for pretty much everyone I really cared about. And then I stayed away, because—well, honestly, I think it was just easier. It wasn’t like I could tell you not to be with him, you know, but I could just…stay away. And I could tell myself that it was because I had better things to do, and that my parents wouldn’t really mind, and that it didn’t matter that he might be here and I wouldn’t because I had _decided_ not to be here.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Rey threw her hands up, palms facing Ben. “Hold on a second. Are you saying that you literally decided to stop coming home for the holidays because you were determined not to see me?!”

It was far from the first time that Rey had assumed that to be the case. But there was a huge difference, she realized now, between convincing herself that that might be the case and hearing that it was from the man himself.

“Well, technically, you were only half of it.” Rey reeled at his candor. “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see you, just more that I couldn’t stomach the thought of seeing you with _him_ , or with anybody else for that matter.”

Firmly back in the realm of confusion, Rey squinted at him, frowning. “Him _who_? My dad?”

“Your dad?” Ben half shouted. “No, what? What does your dad have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know, Ben! You tell me!”

“I didn’t mean your dad, Rey, I meant that guy!”

“What guy?”

“That guy that you were with that day!”

Determined to end the round-and-round direction this conversation was fast devolving in, Rey stopped, squinting at him again and wracking her brain until something began to connect for her.

Rey jumps up from her precarious position on the bed to glower down at him. “Ben, are you talking about Finn?!”

“I don’t know his name! That guy you were with that day that I saw you on the sidewalk.”

Rather than actually responding to Ben, Rey was too focused on making sense of things for herself.

When she speaks again, her tone is outraged. “Finn?! You vanished into thin air because of Finn?!”

Ben doesn’t answer. It’s outside possibility that he could say anything _right_ in this moment, if the fact that Rey has started pacing is anything to go by, so he says nothing at all.

As she keeps pacing, Rey runs her hands through her hair. “Okay, I’m going to need you to make this make sense for me. Because I’m trying really hard to imagine a scenario in which seeing me on the sidewalk with Finn could possibly lead to you not coming home for the next five Christmases.”

He can’t find the words to say, so Ben stammers over several false starts. A wild, desperate sort of sound wrenches its way out of his throat as he falls onto his back on the bed, his hands coming up to cover his face. Though muffled by his fingers, Rey still hears him with perfect clarity as he pleads with her. “Rey, please don’t make me say it.”

Rey freezes and rounds on him. “Say **_what_**?! Ben, I honestly have no idea what the fuck we’re talking about right now.”

“ _Seriously_?” Ben repeats the disgruntled noise as he sits back up, both feet on the ground now. “How are you not getting this?! Rey, seeing you with that guy—with any guy—I genuinely think it would have been less painful if you had just punched me in the face. I just…couldn’t take it.”

“Ben, are you saying—”

He stands and takes a step closer to where Rey is still frozen in the middle of his bedroom. An increasingly desperate part of him wants to reach out and touch her but he doesn’t dare.

“I’m saying—Rey, I’m saying that I physically _could_ _not_ stand there while you introduced me to your boyfriend. Especially not when I had spent the past two years at school missing you like fucking mad.” Ben watches as Rey lifts her hands and uses four fingers flat on her cheeks to wipe away the tears he hadn’t noticed welling in her eyes. “I’m saying that the next year, and the next, and the one after that, and every year since then, the thought of coming home and seeing you and meeting the person you feel in love with instead of me felt insurmountable. I know that it was stupid and selfish, but I just couldn’t face it, so I just…I just didn’t. I stopped coming home and told myself that it was what I wanted, and then I spent the next five years talking myself out of having feelings for you. Which, evidently, was not time well spent, since I saw you in the middle of the tree lot talking to Chewie and knew immediately that I had just been kidding myself.”

Rey is fully crying now, new tears dotting her cheeks as soon as she can wipe the others away. She wants to hug him and slap him and tell him everything she’s been feeling over the last several days, over the last several years. She wants to collapse and to cry and to run and to scream, but she can’t get her legs to move or her mouth to open or her breathing to steady.

At length, she’s able to piece a few fractured words together. “Why now?”

Ben leans marginally closer and asks her to repeat herself. Rey clears her throat and obliges him, now using the back of her right hand to scrub her dampened cheeks.

“Why am I telling you now?” he asks, and she shrugs, which he takes in the affirmative. “Because…well, I guess…just being home this week, seeing you everywhere I went,” he pauses for a moment, breathing deeply. “Honestly, it’s been running through my head all week long. Since that very first minute I saw you again. I just couldn’t imagine going back to my ‘real life’ without telling you the truth.”

Rey inhales shakily, but she doesn’t respond to anything he’s just said. With a sniffle, she mumbles, “I was actually wondering what made you decide to come home now. This year, I mean.”

“Oh, uh,” Ben stammers, face rapidly flushing under Rey’s gaze. “That’s kind of embarrassing actually.”

“Well now you have to tell me,” Rey deadpans.

Ben chuckles uncomfortably, “I guess, I, uh. When my parents called on Thanksgiving, Mom was bugging me about coming home, and I tried to blow her off like I always do, but she uh, pushed a little harder than usual, I guess? And Dad was pressing me for an answer about why I never come home for the holidays and they just would not leave it alone, and I guess I just kind of…blurted the whole thing out?”

Rey laughs now, though it’s probably more at him than with him, Ben figures. She regains enough composure, despite the swirl of different emotions at play in her brain to point out that that doesn’t explain what actually made him come home.

“Well,” Ben reasons, “when I told them…everything, Mom, uh, well, she started by telling me what an idiot I was for about twenty minutes, but then she made a point of telling me that as far as she knew you hadn’t been, um, seeing anyone for a while.”

“And that was enough to get you here?”

Ben’s bronze eyes are sharp beneath a cocked brow as he stares intently at her.

“Rey, I don’t think you understand just how much…enticement that is. But she might have also made some threats about telling you her what an idiot I’d been if I didn’t come home and at least try to do it.”

Rey rolls her lips together, smirking. “That sounds about right.”

“You’re not, are you? Seeing anyone?”

“No,” Rey shakes her head. “No, not lately. And nothing serious, well, ever.”

“Why not?”

She takes a deep breath, exhaling in a rush. “Truthfully?” Ben nods. “Well, I guess it’s because I fell in love with this boy in high school. He was never _actually_ mine, but after that, no one else ever really came close.”

“Lucky guy,” Ben breathes, but he’s looking at Rey like she is the best view he’s ever had, like the only thing he could possibly want to see, like he’d be glad to look at her for the rest of his life. “I don’t think that’s quite true though.”

“What do you mean?”

Ben moves until there are only inches between them, and with a shaking hand, he brushes back the hair that’s just dusting the tops of her shoulder, his large palm smoothing down over her arm until her fingers are dwarfed where they’re folded into his.

“He was always yours, Rey.” His left hand comes to rest in the curve of her waist while the other lifts her knuckles to his lips, the barest of brushes of his skin on hers enough to shake her breathing. Against her slender fingers, he whispers to her, “I still am, if you want me.”

There are slow-falling tears on Rey’s cheeks once more, and she uses her free hand to smear them away. Any words she can find feel like an insufficient reply compared to what Ben has just offered her. She nearly trembles, moving slowly closer until the inches between them are collapsed into mere breaths, and then it is too much for her to resist running the pad of her thumb over the smooth softness of his lips, the quirk rising in the corner of his mouth. Her eyes flit, tracing haphazard patterns all over his face.

Ben is nearly frozen, eyes locked on her as his chest heaves against hers, but then Rey is rocking forward, and her mouth is sealed against his, and Ben feels—after days back in this familiar place—like he has come home.

The kiss only lasts a moment and compared to the desire that each of them feels for the other, it’s remarkably tame. They break apart quickly, Rey drawing far enough away for her nervous eyes to settle on him. Her golden-green irises scan his face intently for any signs of regret or revulsion, but Ben knows she will find nothing of the sort. Instead, his dimples which so rarely surface are out in full force; his crooked teeth are completely visible and his eyes squinted as he beams at her. She says his name on an exhale and her radiant smile overtakes her face bearing dimples of her own that Ben wants to dip his thumbs into to feel the tangible proof of her happiness.

There is still so much between them that needs to be sorted out, but despite knowing that he is as much in love with her as he has ever been, Ben is certain that this thing between them can only move in one direction; he can only fall more in love with her.

Ben kisses her again, and again, and again, until Rey is giggling into his mouth.

“I don’t want to let you go,” he tells her. “Can I just keep you hidden up here with me?”

“Mmmm I think my dad might come looking for me eventually. And I’m pretty sure Leia is going to start asking questions sooner rather than later if we don’t go back down soon.”

Ben holds her in his arms, her delicate palms against him, her face tucked under his chin, for a few more minutes before he can’t help himself any longer.

“Rey…we’re—promise me we can try this? That we’ll actually give this a chance. Please?”

“Ben Solo, if you think I’ve waited this long just to let you walk away—”

She doesn’t get to finish her sentence before he’s kissing her again.

**Epilogue: Christmas, Two Years Later**

As she does every year, Leia has once again taken it upon herself to invite a host of friends and family for Christmas dinner, and once again, Rey and Din have been roped into attending. Amidst the crowd of familiar faces, Rey weaves her way over to the makeshift bar that’s been set up on one of the kitchen countertops.

Just as she’s found the bottle she wants and is about to start pouring, someone stops her.

“Rey, hi,” he says, a soft smile creasing his face that is two years older than when he’d first reappeared in her life but no less perfect for it.

“Ben, hey! How’s it going?”

“Pretty good. How about you? You look like you’re enjoying the party,” Ben laughs lightly, gesturing to where she’s holding the bottle of wine and her glass.

Before she can reply, Ben seems to take notice of something for the first time, and his eyes flicker between her hands and her face for a moment without him saying a word. At length, though, he half-smiles at her.

“Wow. That’s quite a ring.”

Rey looks down to her left hand where her ring finger is decorated by a delicate gold band with a large oval-shaped diamond big enough to cover the area between one knuckle and the next.

“Oh, yeah, uh—” Rey demures, “it’s a little ostentatious, I know. My fiancé—”

“Fiancé?” Ben asks, eyes blowing wide in an instant.

“Yeah. It’s pretty recent.”

“Looks like he has good taste at least.”

“Most of the time,” she smirks.

“Did you bring him home with you?”

Rey nods. “I did, yeah. He’s around here somewhere.” Rey glances behind her, craning around Ben’s shoulder so that the dining and living rooms full of people are both in view.

“Oh, uh, well, I would love to meet him, but I should actually be getting back to my girl. I got a little waylaid and lost her. But maybe our paths will cross again before you leave town though?”

“I hope so.”

Rey smiles up at him, and it’s impossible for Ben not to smile back. They stand there locked on the other’s eyes for a long minute before Ben rounds the counter to stand just behind Rey. With her full glass, she turns to face him. As much as his large frame will allow, Ben flattens himself against the counter in order to let her pass and head back to the party.

As she moves to step by him, Ben’s voice halts her again. “He really is the luckiest man alive, you know? Your fiancé.”

“I don’t know about all that.”

Taking a step closer to her, Ben’s large hand wraps around Rey’s upper arm pulls her to him until he can bend to meet her soft mouth with his own. Despite the fact that they’re entirely exposed in the kitchen and are undoubtedly getting more than a little attention from several of the partygoers around them, he holds her there for as long as she’ll allow.

“I do,” he whispers when they part, and then promptly pecks his lips against the tip of her nose. The way she laughs without a sound is endlessly charming to him, and Ben can only imagine how smitten he looks as he gazes down at her.

When he moves to kiss her again, the two of them are caught in the act.

“Honestly, Solo, isn’t your bedroom just upstairs?”

Ben chuckles as he nuzzles his nose against Rey’s as she tilts her head to peer around him again.

“Are you honestly suggesting that you would prefer it if he took your only daughter upstairs?”

While said daughter smirks, Din cringes, miming nausea. “Blegh, yikes, no, don’t wanna think about it.”

Ben turns, moving to step behind Rey so that he can settle his arms around her waist as she sips her wine, her free hand laying atop his interwoven fingers.

“I’m afraid this one’s on me,” Ben admits, tucking his nose into Rey’s loose curls.

“That does not make me feel better, kid.”

Ben tries to stifle his smile but doesn’t entirely succeed. “Fair enough. Sorry, Din.”

Din rolls his eyes, and he’s clearly about to say something when a ball of energy in a faded green sweater crashes into his legs prompting him to emit a loud _oof_. Din bends down to scoop the newcomer into his arms, propping him on his hip.

He groans playfully, “You’re getting heavy, kiddo. How many Christmas cookies did Uncle Han feed you, huh?”

“Seven!” Gregory shouts proudly.

“No wonder you’re still awake,” Din grumbles, looking to Ben and Rey in the hopes of gaining some sympathy. “I was actually just coming over to say goodnight,” he tells them. “I’ve got to get this guy home. You staying here tonight, Punk?”

Rey nods and passes her glass to Ben. As she walks around the counter laden with food and drinks, she informs her father, “Yeah, since we spent last night with you guys, we promised Leia we’d spend tonight here. But we’ll definitely see you both tomorrow.” With a kiss to his cheek, she murmurs, “Good night, Dad.” She kisses Gregory’s head where it lays on Din’s shoulder. “Good night, little brother.”

“Night, sissy,” Gregory replies through a yawn, clearly already winding down. Rey knows he’ll probably be asleep as soon as Din gets him through the door, if not sooner.

“Merry Christmas to both of you.”

“Back at you, little girl. You too, Solo.”

“Merry Christmas, Din. Merry Christmas, buddy.” Ben leans over the counter to high-five the drowsy boy who beams back at him with missing teeth.

“Alright, we’re going to get out of here. We’ll see you two tomorrow.” With a final nod at Ben and a kiss to his daughter’s temple, Din starts weaving his way toward the front of the house.

At the same time, Rey rounds the counter again, pulling her glass from Ben’s lips as he takes a large mouthful. “Thief.”

He shrugs, guilty and smug. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mmmmmm,” Ben drawls, placing the half-empty glass on the counter and pulling Rey in until their hips align and she has to lean her upper body slightly backwards to see his face. “Pretty sure I just got permission to take my fiancé upstairs, and from her father no less.”

“I’m pretty sure that is _not_ what he meant.”

“Plausible deniability, baby.”

Rey allows him a moment to kiss her again before she pushes lightly on his chest to back him up. “There are still a lot of people here, Ben. And I don’t think you fucking me in your childhood bedroom is exactly the background music your mother had in mind for this evening.”

“Well, if _somebody_ could keep quiet…” he teases, eyebrows lifting pointedly, Solo smirk hard at work.

She swats playfully at him. “I can’t help it and you know it, you big brat,” she grumbles, and Ben can’t help but kiss her again, though it’s mostly ineffectual with the way he’s smiling into it.

“Think of it this way,” he tells her, “this is the only Christmas I’ll be able to fuck my fiancé. By this time next year, I’ll be fucking my _wife_.”

“That…is a very good point, Mr. Solo.”

“Sooooo…?”

With another laugh and another kiss, Rey whispers, “One more hour. Everyone will be leaving or passing out by then.”

“Sweetheart,” Ben pouts, but she shushes him with a manicured finger against his lips.

“Hush, you. Besides, goodness knows we’re both pros at waiting for each other.”

With his lips brushing her hairline as he pulls her close and tucks her smaller body against his own, Ben whispers to the love of his life, “Worth every minute.”

**The End**

**Author's Note:**

> Did I drop several little real-life easter eggs about myself and references to some of my favorite holiday things in this fic? Maybe. Am I incapable of writing anything that's not ridiculously fluffy? Yes.
> 
> Come say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/jennyb_b8)!


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